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> unplanned power cuts

Actually load shedding is planned power cuts. I have seen a schedule published in a newspaper with different regions of the city (not Delhi) and times when no electricity will be available. This is for ppl to plan their day

Every second house had a diesel generator back then. Ours had to be cranked started by hand(not for the heartless) before push button starters became a thing. The shutoff though was simple tug on the switch; I attached a twine that ran to my bedside for shutoff, which was a godsend at 2:00 AM when the power came back on to make those crazy summer days a bit easier to sleep through.

Do you remember the scheduled water cuts? We would stockpile water in buckets so we could flush the toilets. Good old days!

> My office was wired with two sets of electrical sockets, one connected to grid mains and the other connected to the UPS (for important equipment only).

This I think is a standard practice in any large office building in France (Europe? Global?) too, regardless of the frequency of the power cuts. I don't remember witnessing any power cuts in the office (not since long ago anyway), but in most of the places there are systematically white and red sockets, red ones being powered through a UPS. So, server machines go into red ones. Well, we don't have servers anymore, but the sockets are still there anyway. Hopefully UPS too, LOL.

Sounds similar to life in Dhaka in the 1980s. I remember many sleepless nights where the power went out for no discernible reason and our air conditioner (a window unit in my parent’s bedroom) stopped working. My understanding is that this has gotten much better in Dhaka over the last decade, though the recent energy crisis set things back.

I spent two weeks in Bangalore in 2014. Power cuts happened roughly every other day.

Thankfully, I stayed in a nice hotel with an automatic generator, so the power would cut out for a second or two before the generator came on, and then would cut back out for a second or two a few minutes later when the hotel went back on the mains.

I still remember those summer midnights, without cooler

How's life these days over there?

They make surge protectors

> I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago?

The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".

> I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago?

I wonder how many HNers are, or ever have been there in the first place? It seems strange to me to ask who "recalls" what it was like there before. What would such a recollection be based on? There's only so much attention one can pay to what daily life is reportedly like around the world, and that required believing the reports.

Well the planet is theirs as well, so one may argue that putting up live wires that can electrocute them is quite cruel in the first place, especially given the lack of any preservation of their natural habitats in most places.

Rooftop solar use had and continues to explode in most tier 2 cites where its seen as a great way to save on electricity bills by feeding that power back to the grid. Its one of the few bright spots in a country with relentless expenses and price pressures.

Great, sounds like youve planned for the 1/3 of the electrical load that residential usage represents.

This is some kind of totally wrong reporting. Maybe some other country was meant, or the author mixed us up with Elbonia from Dilbert.

We do not have issues with electricity here or planned power cuts or whatever else.

I would like to see where this professor got his data for losses from. Maybe his data is flawed.

As far as I can tell, that number comes from the World Bank and it defines electricity loss as a percentage of domestic production. But Estonia imports a lot of its electricity, and that imported electricity is not included on the generation side of the equation.

It may be that they over-generate currently to account for the excess losses, which would be very costly given current fuel prices unless most of it is from environmental sources.

They split from the Russian grid and it is causing growing pains. Generation is limited to oil and comprised of aging soviet era plants. They are upgrading but it takes time.

name one start up

"The ones who pay will pay" is always true (from people using public transport without a ticket to "normal" tax payers having to shoulder the losses caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%), but resigning to it so explicitly is rare.

> The ones who pay will pay.

Until solar panels came to liberate us from the utility overlords.

I mean this is the case universally, even if the losses aren't in a specific line item the cost of generating that power has to be covered overall

There's usually an incentive to solve this though because this shrinkage, in retail terms, would be handled at the cost of power generated (without any profit margin) whereas if it was sold to a paying customer it'd have a margin built in. If the Greek utilities are allowed to make a profit on that losses line item, that is insane

It seems to be an investment in underground distribution structures and advanced monitoring including predictive failure analysis.

However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.

Singapore is also a 730 km^2 island city-state with a population of about 6.2 million people. I have honestly no idea why people and articles keep comparing it to literally the largest countries on the planet both in terms of land area and population. Ask any other wealthy cosmopolitan world city of about the same area and population what their electricity reliability figures are, and the answers will probably be quite similar.

Inb4 (in this case in-after) trope answers (see below) like 'veneer of perfectly clean and orderly society', 'punitive'. It is small; that is why it can get stuff done.

Singapore is a very small city. Distribution losses are linear with distance!

In Hyderabad, India the govt loses around 2 million kWh per day(roughly 50-60 million USD per year) in theft and unpaid electricity bills every year particularly the old city area where residents refuse to pay the bills.

Bill collectors are openly threatened by local elected leaders even in the presence of police.

The state chief minister(similar to a governor) acknowledged the problem and is planning to handover bill collection to a private firm specifically for that part of the city. The opposition is against the move as the area represents a major voting bloc.

Sometimes, policy based solutions work but political will is also necessary to enforce those policies.

Very difficult to raise electricity prices in retail areas in INdia. Political protests follow quickly. Also IIRC 30-40% waste in some places is almost always politically sanctioned theft. This is in addition to a lot more money lost as some entities that are politically controlled (e.g. Sugar factories in my state) purposely do not pay or delay. It is a miracle that the DISCOMs do not end up like neighboring Pakistan. It is like an invisible bargain with a lot of voting population and especially farmers (where no distinction is made between large land holding 1% vs others) who are routinely given free electricity. Cross subsidy is in the DNA of India.

Personally a Ghalib fan myself but love that despite their rivalry they both loved dilli to the end.

The power companies will just say that if they let everyone do that, it will kill line technicians and boom, no one gets solar. Happening in the USA today

Modernity transition happening in real time. Not just electricity, but also the state institutions and the public.

You can't easily move energy from one place to another without losing some of it: https://www.ceer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/3rd-CEER-Repo... That doesn't necessarily result in power outages, though.

To me transformation efficiency and distance losses actually seem to make 5-6% pretty impressive?

> I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

For some problems, the closer you get to perfection, the harder the next step is.

It’s where you’ll find most countries with a good handle on their electric network, advanced economies or not. You can do better but it requires either very small service distances (so you don’t have transmission losses in the first place) or an extreme dedication to hunting them down.

I'm not sure what that percentage means, but power-cuts in Belgium are extremely rare.

Czechia is at 5-6 per cent as well, even though our grid companies are quite good. This is the price for having rural areas. Within a single compact city, like Singapore, you can get under 1 per cent easily. One the distances grow to hundreds of kilometers, some non-negligible loss is inevitable.

I don't think that number is correct?

In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).

There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).

It's embarrassing that it took so long. India has been crippled by decades of socialist government overreach. Unfortunately, even the purportedly right wing BJP is unable to keep the government out of places where it doesn't belong.

They do mean loss. Literally losing electricity as heat because of resistance. You can never reduce this to zero, but various problems can compound to increase the loss to ridiculous levels.

A well functioning government that regulates things is so crucial to everything in a technological life.