The July 2012 India Blackouts
On 30 July 2012, Northern, Eastern and Northeastern India: Three of India's regional grids collapsed on consecutive days, the largest power outage ever recorded.
Key Facts
- The bigger of the two outages, on 31 July 2012, affected about 620 million people.
- It remains the largest power outage on record by people affected.
- Three regional grids, serving 22 states, failed together.
- The cause was states drawing more power than agreed, not an equipment fault.
What Happened
A weak monsoon pushed farmers to draw far more electricity than usual for irrigation pumps, at the same time as a heatwave was lifting demand for cooling. Several states drew more power from the shared northern grid than they were allotted, and on 30 July the strain caused it to collapse.
About 620 million people, then close to a tenth of the world's population, lost power in the outage on 31 July, when the northern, eastern and northeastern grids all failed together. Hundreds of trains stopped mid journey, traffic lights across northern India went dark, and hundreds of coal miners were briefly trapped underground.
The scale of the failure pushed India to strengthen the penalties and monitoring that keep individual states from overdrawing a shared grid, a discipline problem more than an equipment one.
Cause
Grid discipline: states overdrawing a shared grid under heatwave and drought demand
Researched independently from public reporting, not from this site's own data. Source: Wikipedia: 2012 India blackouts.