On August 9th an electrical power outage hit people in parts of Cairo. This happened only ten days after India’s massive blackout grew to cover 22 northern states and impacted 600 million people. Both outages snarled traffic, stopped trains and turned off the lights for millions of people. But they also shared a common cause. When an event impacts 9 percent of the world’s population, it is reasonable to look for a root cause.
India’s weather was hot and humid during the early morning hours of July 30, 2012, but nothing out of the ordinary for late summer in this part of the world. There were no typhoons, earthquakes, solar flares or computer glitches to be blamed. A circuit breaker tripped on a power line between Bina and Gwalion, nothing out of the ordinary– the sort of problem electrical grids are designed to solve.
No, the biggest electricity blackout in human history appears to have been caused by “overdrawl.” In other words, the people of northern India simply used more power than the utilities could supply.
On the surface it appears that Egypt’s power problems are more complex. The outage which struck southern Egypt earlier in the month was blamed on a failed power plant. A failed power line, hot weather during Ramadan and Aswan electricity thieves have all been blamed for contributing to Cairo’s outage.
But modern electrical grids are designed with an excess capacity margin and enough redundancy to work around small problems.
Both the Indian and Egyptian power problems are larger and deeper than they appear. The root of these problems is that demand for electricity is outpacing supply, leaving precious little margin for error.
Image of desert mountain sun from Shutterstock
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
Apparently they think they can grow their population forever without consequences — big mistake.