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#power#india#losses#electricity#where#loss#cuts#government#pay#planned

Discussion (87 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

motionlessveloc•about 2 hours ago
I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago? Cutting electricity loss is one thing, but getting rid of "load shedding" (unplanned power cuts) is the really revolutionary part. It was not uncommon for the power to go out several times a day and you had to rush to unplug expensive appliances (TV, laptop), because when the power came back it was often accompanied by a surge. 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).
rayiner•5 minutes ago
[delayed]
devnull3•about 2 hours ago
> 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

underdeserver•about 1 hour ago
I suspect the semantics are about how long in advance it's planned. A day or two? Planned. An hour? Hard sell.
Waterluvian•39 minutes ago
Planned collision with iceberg!
actionfromafar•about 1 hour ago
Load shedding = it was done on purpose, not that it was pre-planned. If a sudden problem occurs, some areas can be cut to prevent wider failure. I would expect this to be largely automatic.
newsoftheday•12 minutes ago
> 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!".

Gangway0829•about 1 hour ago
Do you remember the scheduled water cuts? We would stockpile water in buckets so we could flush the toilets. Good old days!
shrikant•about 1 hour ago
I remember the inverse of that in Chennai -- scheduled running water for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evenings when we had to stockpile water in every container possible.
parthdesai•about 1 hour ago
It's so weird reading these comments, we didn't have either of these issues in Gujarat in early 2000s (left India in mid 2000s).
belowavgiq•19 minutes ago
India's ongoing growth, and overall the positive sentiment of the population, is such a breath of fresh air compared to the decadent west. It's just a shame that you are also speedrunning population collapse. Modi completely ignoring the cratering birth rates under him is a real hero.
nemomarx•13 minutes ago
Who's not speed running that right now? I can't really fault India in particular when it's nearly universal.
belowavgiq•10 minutes ago
You said it yourself, nearly, so it's not something written in stone.

I can fault India (and, in particular, Modi) for repeating the same mistake all other western developed countries made 40 years before, yes.

pjc50•5 minutes ago
> population collapse

There are 1.2 billion Indians.

gwbas1c•20 minutes ago
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.

bornpsy•about 1 hour ago
I still remember those summer midnights, without cooler
moralestapia•about 1 hour ago
How's life these days over there?
Gangway0829•about 1 hour ago
We've traded power cuts for pollution. The current government seems energetic enough in trying to fix the problem, but frankly it's something every single developed country in existence went through at some point, so there's probably no escaping it. Hopefully the pollution era will be shorter than it was in other places!
moralestapia•27 minutes ago
I hope you make it brother, it's good to hear there have been improvements in some areas of life at least.
zeristor•about 1 hour ago
Estonia?!

Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.

skeletal88•about 1 hour ago
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.

croisillon•about 1 hour ago
i dunno, if you follow the link to https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS?end=2024... you see Estonia has high distribution losses?
rpozarickij•27 minutes ago
> Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela

Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.

Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).

dspillett•about 1 hour ago
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.
whatever1•about 2 hours ago
In Greece there is no incentive to fix power losses since the electric bill has a power losses line item.

You can steal as much as you want. The ones who pay will pay.

rob74•about 1 hour ago
"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.
philipallstar•about 1 hour ago
> caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%

You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.

TeMPOraL•34 minutes ago
Yeah. My impression is, small players exploit the loopholes like there's no tomorrow, big players hire external consultants to give them least-effort playbook and take over liability, as anything more clever is exponentially more expensive.
mixdup•about 1 hour ago
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

sokoloff•about 1 hour ago
If a utility is regulated to a set profit outcome, it will make a profit on stolen electricity just via math.
mixdup•29 minutes ago
it depends on how the regulations are written. not every single cost gets to go into the guaranteed return on equity. Probably plenty of examples where it is, but also there are definitely a lot of examples where that's not true. Given how militant most utilities are at preventing theft, either parent comment OP is just being cynical or there is something very off about the situation there vs. most places
blitzar•about 1 hour ago
> The ones who pay will pay.

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

whatever1•about 1 hour ago
And handed us over to the mafias that collect protection money for solar panels.

A failed state will be fail-stating regardless of the technology.

TeMPOraL•32 minutes ago
Indeed, you need to insure from the risk of brick-rain where this weather phenomenon occurs!
inglor_cz•34 minutes ago
In places where the grid is reliable, approximately no one disconnects voluntarily from it, and solar panels are just a nice extra.

It is the places where the grid is failing where solar panels indeed liberate you, but not from the utility overlords, but from incompetent and corrupt governance.

bob1029•about 1 hour ago
I want to know what Singapore's grid operators have been up to. That seems to be the more interesting story based on the data in this article.
Gangway0829•about 1 hour ago
Singapore is a very small city. Distribution losses are linear with distance!
boringg•about 1 hour ago
So basically theft and fixing overloaded infra. So this is policy based solutions for the most part.

Amazing that places have 50% power loss.

devsda•39 minutes ago
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.

ivewonyoung•about 1 hour ago
> In areas where theft was particularly rampant and losses were as high as 83 percent, according to Tata, the companies took a different strategy. These pockets of Delhi were predominantly occupied by low-income families. Tata Power, and later BSES, worked to improve the water supply for these residents and provide educational opportunities, such as instruction in reading and writing in Hindi as well as financial literacy. These efforts focused on the women, who were at home more, and paid them to collect electricity payments from their neighbors. Bill payment rates from these areas are now on par with those of other parts of Delhi

This is... interesting on multiple levels.

pjc50•8 minutes ago
Modernity transition happening in real time. Not just electricity, but also the state institutions and the public.
mc32•about 2 hours ago
That’s quite the achievement. Though a side note of comparison I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range. Unless I’m misunderstanding what that means, it seems excessive for a modern economy.
yorwba•about 1 hour ago
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.
anarazel•about 2 hours ago
To me transformation efficiency and distance losses actually seem to make 5-6% pretty impressive?
bluGill•about 1 hour ago
30 years ago my local electric co-op was bragging they got transmission losses down to 4%, when the rest of US was 8% (I'm not sure if that is average or some other statistical term).

But yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large

mixdup•about 1 hour ago
every step in the chain loses power. You lose power just in the power lines. Every trip through a transformer adds some more loss

Reducing the number of transformers, raising the high side of system voltage, and increasing conductor sizes are all ways to reduce the transmission losses. of course each of those requires investments so that's why it can be variable and also something to brag about

masklinn•25 minutes ago
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.
inglor_cz•31 minutes ago
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.
olmo23•about 1 hour ago
I'm not sure what that percentage means, but power-cuts in Belgium are extremely rare.
NicoJuicy•about 1 hour ago
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).

inglor_cz•29 minutes ago
5-6 percent of electricity loss just mean that 5-6 percent of the electricity produced by all power plants in your country never reach the customer. Not that you have blackouts 5-6 percent of the time.

As of now, we cannot do lossless transmission. If some Ultragrok comes with room-pressure and room-temperature superconductors, then maybe.

Gangway0829•about 2 hours ago
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.
sirtaj•about 1 hour ago
The privatisation of Delhi power distribution was initiated by a Congress state government in 2000.
Gangway0829•about 1 hour ago
I am aware. The initial privatization push was initiated by Congress in 1991! My lament is that privatization has remained anemic, even under the so-called right wing BJP.

But you should also acknowledge that national electrical reform was done by BJP. The real problem for Indian politics was the re-entry of the Gandhi nepo-baby dynasty. We would be a lot better off if they hadn't gotten their claws back into the INC.

mc32•about 2 hours ago
True it should never have gotten so bad, but when there is no incentive to invest, this is the result you can expect. This happened in Venezuela and South Africa too - though SA also suffers from massive corruption (officials pocketing moneys and diverting from investment in infra).
SanjayMehta•about 1 hour ago
The BJP is marginally less socialist than the Congress. On the positive side, they are definitely less corrupt than the Congress.
khriss•26 minutes ago
Really? The recent headlines would suggest otherwise.
inglor_cz•28 minutes ago
Has the Congress moved to the right?

The License Raj prior to 1991 was pretty socialist, and it was a Congress policy.

leosanchez•about 2 hours ago
> India has been crippled by decades of socialist government overreach.

It baffles me that country still has strong anti-capitalist views. I guess lack of education does that to people.

Also, BJP is slightly right of Congress (post 1991) when it comes to economics.

Gangway0829•about 2 hours ago
Being to the right of the current INC is not an achievement. The only people not in that position are Maoists.

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of the wealthy and powerful. For instance, I personally quite dislike our new AI ruling class. But unfortunately, in India there was an attitude since independence that it is impossible to generate wealth in a legitimate manner. Which is going way too far! And has predictably bad outcomes for the country.

bell-cot•about 2 hours ago
> It baffles me that...

While the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company was, as a broad generality, not nearly so vile as (say) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Am..., it certainly didn't leave many Indians with a favorable impression of European-style capitalism.

collabs•about 1 hour ago
> It baffles me that country still has strong anti-capitalist views.

I wouldn't call the "license raj" of India as anti-capitalist. India arguably has the strongest of institutions of all the countries in South Asia. However, even its institutions and regulations are pathetically weak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

You probably also saw a previous post right here on this orange website when someone tried to repatriate their business money outside of India. It was painful just to read that they had to get approvals from iirc sixteen different government agencies to get their own money that they brought in from outside of India back. Not profits, not proceeds, a fraction of what they put in.

Neither of these two cases is due to "anti-capitalist" views of India. If you look at what was India before Moghul rule and British rule, you could argue India has never been socialist before.

I think workers everywhere should have "strong anti-capitalist views", because unrestrained capitalism is just anarchy.

Lagoon3384_SWE•34 minutes ago
India superpower by 2030!
noisy_boy•about 1 hour ago
tldr; they passed the administration of power from the corrupt government officials to Tata power (part of the Tata conglomerate) and BSES (part of another conglomerate Reliance). They modernized the setup and closed loopholes and avenues of corruption and also made stealing of power by the corrupt sections of public difficult.
epistasis•39 minutes ago
A well functioning government that regulates things is so crucial to everything in a technological life.
leosanchez•about 2 hours ago
Vajpayee FTW?