Mr Lalit Jalan CEO of Reliance Infrastructure Ltd said that India needs a more cohesive energy policy and stringent grid management to avoid a recurrence of the power outages that hit hundreds of millions of people this week.

Mr Jalan in an interview said that he was unsettled when the power went off while he was visiting a Delhi bureaucrat on Tuesday in a building supplied by his company and that he then felt relieved to learn it was caused by grid failure, not a company lapse.

Three of India's five transmission grids collapsed on Tuesday, cutting power to states where some 670 million people live. The blackout, one of the world's worst, followed a similar breakdown across the north the previous day.

The reasons for the failures were still being studied, but the central government has said some states overstepped quotas as a poor monsoon caused greater than expected demand by farmers to pump water for irrigation.

Mr Jalan said that "The protection systems did not work, or they were bypassed, or the protocol was not followed - all very serious issues.”

He added that "The second aspect is overdrawing, so the discipline was missing adding that exemplary punishment was needed to enforce discipline in future.”

Mr Jalan said that "Depending on how many leaves of the onion you want to open, everything is an issue, and it is not that the issues are not known.” He cited overlapping governance by a number of ministries and states, lack of political will, lack of resources and turf wars.

Source - Economic Times

(www.steelguru.com)