How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent (spectrum.ieee.org)

397 pointsby rbanffy9 hours ago227 comments

motionlessveloc 9 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).

devnull3 9 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

actionfromafar 8 hours 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.

vinay_ys 7 hours ago

There was some priority order to determine which circuits should be load-shed when there is a power shortage. For example while scouting datacenter sites across Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, I learnt that 220KV lines were not part of load-shedding schedule whereas 66KV lines were. If you took power directly from the power generation company and had contracted power then also you were protected.

underdeserver 8 hours ago

I suspect the semantics are about how long in advance it's planned. A day or two? Planned. An hour? Hard sell.

Waterluvian 8 hours ago

Planned collision with iceberg!

dylan604 7 hours ago

Far enough in advance to be available in a printed newspaper. Planned.

devnull3 2 hours ago

The load shedding was a chronic problem. It lasted months if not years.

Example from year 2003 (city = Pune) [1]. Its hard to read

Excerpt:

The load shedding schedule is as follows:

  Group A: Monday 8 am to 11 am, Tuesday 11 am to 2 pm,Wednesday 3 to 6 pm, Saturday 11 am to 2 pm: Navi Peth, Gultekdi I and II, Dhankawdi, Padmawati, Old Parvati I and II, SNDT, G Block, Parsi agiary, City Apollo, Sant Tukaram, Kharalwadi. 

  Group B: Monday 11 am to 2 pm, Tuesday 3 pm to 6 pm, Friday 8 am to 11 am

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/mseb-announces...

londons_explore 38 minutes ago

I just don't understand why government didn't step in and raise the price of electricity 5x.

It is better to have electricity 24x7 but only 50 watts to run a fridge, phone charger and one lightbulb, than to have electricity 3 hours a day but be running 1000 watts of airconditioners.

I guess perhaps energy theft was too hard to police?

Retric 25 minutes ago

You’re assuming a far more functional system than what was going on.

“And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power.”

Collecting more money in a corrupt organization doesn’t means they will automatically get a more effective distribution system.

__rito__ 7 hours ago

Planned for the electric officials, unplanned for the consumers.

Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.

Gangway0829 9 hours ago

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

shrikant 8 hours 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 8 hours 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).

saonnet 8 hours ago

Modi hai to mumkin hai!

parthdesai 8 hours ago

I mean that was one of the reasons why he got re-elected twice in Gujarat. It's a shame what that party has devolved to now

blackoil 8 hours ago

one of. other is he killed Muslims.

newyankee 7 hours ago

Riots in India are uncontrollable. Muslims killed 59 Hindus returning from Ayodhya by burning a train full of innocent karsevaks which started the riots

conmod278 6 hours ago

One thing I have noticed is "It is very easy for the Empire to vassalize Muslim countries". Try to notice next time.

kshri24 6 hours ago

This trope is going to get you guys nowhere. The Gujarat riots started with burning of a train filled with Hindu Karsevaks by Muslims. Once religious riots start in India no politician can control it. It requires military intervention. Gujarat riots was curbed the fastest if you compare it to any other riot in Independent India. It was ended in 3 days. By comparison, 1984 Sikh riots took 4 days to end.

fakedang 6 hours ago

Can we not call it the Sikh riots? Those were riots by Congress, the BJP and VHP and their supporters against the Sikhs. The Sikhs didn't rise up. You don't call the Gujarat riots the "Muslim riots" do you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots

Perpetrators - Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

And if you want lessons on riot control, learn from Kerala. North Kerala is host to an uncountable number of Hindu-Muslim riot triggers but most of them are defused before they can take root, and if they do occur, the riots are curbed in a day or so.

This one is the most recent and deadliest riot in Kerala - defused in 2 days before it could escalate because of timely police action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marad_massacre

And this is the entry for the Gujarat riots - Perpetrators: Government of Gujarat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

To quote some extracts :

> Throughout the violence, attacks were made in full view of police stations and police officers who did not intervene.[15] In many instances, police joined the mobs in perpetrating violence. At one Muslim locality, of the twenty-nine deaths, sixteen were caused by police firing into the locality.[18] Some rioters even had printouts of voter registration lists, allowing them to selectively target Muslim properties.[66][75][65] Selective targeting of properties was shown by the destruction of the offices of the Muslim Wakf board which was located within the confines of the high security zone and just 500 meters from the office of the chief minister.[61]

> The violence had been planned far in advance, and that similar to other instances of communal violence the Bajrang Dal, the VHP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) all took part in the attacks.[64] Following the attack on the train the VHP called for a statewide bandh (strike), and the state took no action to prevent this.[61][62]

> The Concerned Citizens Tribunal (CCT) report includes testimony of the then Gujarat BJP minister Haren Pandya (since murdered), who testified about an evening meeting convened by Modi the evening of the train burning. At this meeting, officials were instructed not to obstruct the Hindu rage following the incident.[109][110] The report also highlighted a second meeting, held in Lunawada village of Panchmahal district, attended by state ministers Ashok Bhatt, and Prabhatsinh Chauhan, among other BJP and RSS leaders, where "detailed plans were made on the use of kerosene and petrol for arson and other methods of killing."[70][110] The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind claimed in 2002 that some regional Congress workers collaborated with the perpetrators of the violence.[111]

> Dipankar Gupta believes that the state and police were clearly complicit in the violence, but that some officers were outstanding in the performance of their duties, such as Himanshu Bhatt and Rahul Sharma. Sharma was reported to have said "I don't think any other job would have allowed me to save so many lives."[112] Human Rights Watch has reported on acts of exceptional heroism by Hindus, Dalits and tribals who tried to protect Muslims from the violence.

Don't repeat BS talking points that the government couldn't do anything. If the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it has lost its legitimacy. That's literally one of the main jobs of the people in power.

Oh, and what did Gujarat do to Rahul Sharma, the IIT grad police officer who was one of the few officers to actually try to stop the riots? They transferred him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahul_Sharma_(Gujarat_police)

kshri24 5 hours ago

EDIT: funny how you edited your post and added BJP and VHP as part of Anti-Sikh riots. This is as fake as it can get. BJP and VHP actually saved many Sikhs from getting massacred. Why TF would BJP and VHP kill Sikhs? Indira Gandhi was not part of either BJP or VHP. She was part of Congress Party. This is how I know you are peddling propaganda.

> Can we not call it the Sikh riots? Those were riots by Congress and its supporters against the Sikhs. The Sikhs didn't rise up. You don't call the Gujarat riots the "Muslim riots" do you?

Why did the riots even begin in the first place? Because Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by her two Sikh body guards. It was as revenge for Operation Bluestar which targeted Khalistani terrorists who had taken over the Golden Temple. Now I have no love for Congress or Gandhi family but you cannot exclude the history from it or cherry pick it according to your liking. Khalistani terrorism was at its peak during that period. Just look at the history of how many Hindus were killed during the militancy in Punjab.

> You don't call the Gujarat riots the "Muslim riots" do you?

It is not a name I have given. I did not decide to name 1984 riots as Sikh or Anti-Sikh riots. I did not decide to name 2002 riots as Gujarat riots. That is literally what it is called. There is no reason to get so butthurt about the name.

> And if you want lessons on riot control, learn from Kerala. North Kerala is host to an uncountable number of Hindu-Muslim riot triggers but most of them are defused before they can take root, and if they do occur, the riots are curbed in a day or so.

LMFAO this is the worst state when it comes to controlling riots. It tolerated Moplah Genocide of all things. Lasted several months.

> This one is the most recent and deadliest riot in Kerala - defused in 2 days before it could escalate because of timely police action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marad_massacre

This is not a riot mate. This is a terror attack. Do you not know the difference between a riot and a terror attack?

> Don't repeat BS talking points that the government couldn't do anything. If the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it has lost its legitimacy. That's literally one of the main jobs of the people in power.

I never said Government couldn't do anything. Are you unable to comprehend what I wrote? I wrote politicians have no power to stop riots. It is only the military (which is also part of the Government) that has the power.

fakedang 5 hours ago

Your "Sikh riots" are literally called the "anti-Sikh riots". You don't get to brand the entire community just because the root cause was an assassination perpetrated by fringe elements of that community.

Second, very laughable of you to call out the Moplah rebellion, which happened in the 1910s lol. Are you still stuck in the British Raj, pre-WW1?

Third, Marad was a riot, except it was extinguished in a day (by a North Indian Hindu top cop by the way), because of timely action by the police in actually discovering the weapons. What could've been a terror attack was averted.

> I wrote politicians have no power to stop riots. It is only the military (which is also part of the Government) that has the power.

And fourthly, no riots in any democracy across the world are controlled by the military lol. The military serves a different purpose, and using them for tasks such as riot control is exactly how you end up with another Tiananmen Square massacre (in which case, the military were explicitly called because the civilian police of Beijing did not want to shoot and kill the protesters). Perhaps that's where your mind is, to make India another one-party Hindutva dictatorship.

My edits were taken from the Wikipedia article only.

kshri24 5 hours ago

EDIT: > Perhaps that's where your mind is, to make India another one-party Hindutva dictatorship

Thanks for confirming you are part of the propaganda. I have no further interest in continuing this discussion with a lunatic.

> My edits were taken from the Wikipedia article only.

Your edits even in the Wikipedia article call it "dubious". You still mentioned it anyway, without mentioning that the claim is dubious, because you are part of the propaganda machine.

> And fourthly, no riots in any democracy across the world are controlled by the military lol

It infact IS controlled by the military. In US, for example, it is called National Guard. Police is not equipped to control a riot in any democracy in the World. India is actually an exception where it has a CRPF for riots and because scale of riots in India exceeds even the CRPF's ability to handle it (due to our size and population), the Military is called.

> Second, very laughable of you to call out the Moplah rebellion, which happened in the 1910s lol.

Moplah Genocide was not part of the rebellion. Unless you want to call Muslims genociding Hindus and raping Hindu women as part of rebellion against the British Raj. Have some shame. And it happened in 1921 not 1910.

qwerty_sideshow 4 hours ago

The historical debate was revived globally when a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary highlighted a previously unreleased, classified 2002 British Foreign Office report. The internal UK government report concluded that the violence was pre-planned and that the rioting had all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing," alleging that Modi was "directly responsible" for the political climate that allowed it. The Indian government banned the documentary domestically, calling it a biased piece of colonial propaganda.

kshri24 2 hours ago

Because it is propaganda. Explain to me how it is ethnic cleansing with figures. The same BBC did not recognize Kashmiri Pandits genocide, rape and exodus as ethnic cleansing but calls 2002 Gujarat Riots as ethnic cleansing? Do you guys even know what "ethnic cleansing" even means? Muslims are 10% of Gujarat's population. Roughly 6 million Muslims. In 2002 they were 4.6 million. Please tell me how TF is that ethnic cleansing? Compare it to Kashmiri Pandit Hindu genocide, rape and exodus of 1990s. In 1989, Kashmiri Hindus were roughly 150,000 in number. They were systematically targeted and wiped out from the Valley. Today there are only 3,000 Kashmiri Pandits.

Has BBC made any fucking documentary on this? No it has not.

Nor will losers like you question the blatant hypocrisy and propaganda.

> The internal UK government report concluded that the violence was pre-planned and that the rioting had all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing," alleging that Modi was "directly responsible" for the political climate that allowed it

"Internal UK government report" belongs in the dustbin.

> all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing,"

Please elucidate what those hallmarks are. I am extremely curious to know what the yardstick is for "ethnic cleansing" according to UK government.

throwaway7783 an hour ago

Supposed to be unbiased because "Internal UK government report"?. Both the train and the riots were crimes against humanity. Sorry if Indians don't believe shit coming from the UK.

qwerty_sideshow 6 hours ago

Let’s not lie now.

IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt alleged that at a meeting on the night of February 27, 2002, Modi told senior police that Hindus should be allowed to "vent their anger." Another officer, R.B. Sreekumar, said he was denied a promotion for criticizing the government's inaction

parthdesai 5 hours ago

I've no horse in this debate; why create a throwaway account for this comment?

kshri24 2 hours ago

Sanjiv Bhatt's wife fought on Congress ticket. R. B. Sreekumar was implicated and charged for framing a highly decorated ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan in a fake espionage case.

Both are dubious characters with conflict of interests and one of them even straight up went against an innocent scientist just to massage his fat ego.

leosanchez 7 hours ago

Still better than INC (Rahul Gandhi) IMO.

Would reconsider if INC appoint someone competent like Shashi Tharoor.

intended 6 hours ago

Or Bombay for that matter.

bornpsy 9 hours ago

I still remember those summer midnights, without cooler

moralestapia 8 hours ago

How's life these days over there?

Gangway0829 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

It's good to hear there have been improvements in some areas of life at least.

gwbas1c 7 hours 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.

vinay_ys 7 hours ago

Depends on the season. Until a few years ago Bengaluru had a different problem – when it thundered or rained, they would cut power to protect transformers from shorting out due to falling trees on power lines.

bradlys 6 hours ago

They have PG&E in India too? Dang.

newsoftheday 7 hours 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!".

vidarh 7 hours ago

Played by Brian George, who I don't think has ever lived in India (his parents did, and he is part Indian, but he was born in Israel and grew up in London and Canada).

thaumasiotes 4 hours ago

I personally feel fully qualified to say "It's always hot in India". I'm a native speaker.

I don't personally know that the statement is true, but if that's your issue you should be criticizing the writer, not the actor.

rayiner 7 hours ago

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.

martinpw 3 hours ago

> I remember many sleepless nights where the power went out

Genuine question - how did people sleep there pre-AC?

rayiner 2 hours ago

Probably outside to catch the breeze. We lived i like a concrete bunker so it was good at holding in heat at night.

minnowguy 2 hours ago

I once spent most of the summer in a WW2-era building with no AC in the southeastern US (Ft Benning). I imagine it is both hotter and more humid in much of India.

Short answer is that you get used to it. There was a surprisingly effective swamp cooler that worked about half the time (we got pretty good at troubleshooting it) and several ancient pedestal fans. You can sleep in very nearly any environment once you become sufficiently sleep-deprived.

ghm2180 6 hours ago

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.

fastball 5 hours ago

Small tangential note, but I think you might mean "not for the faint of heart".

zahlman 5 hours ago

> 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.

kelipso 4 hours ago

At least a quarter of tech professionals in Silicon Valley are born in India. So I would guess a quarter to a third or more of the posters here are Indian origin.

India accounts for a big portion of the english speaking internet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the posters here are Indian origin.

downrightmike 4 hours ago

They make surge protectors

someonebaggy 37 minutes ago

They don't work nearly as well as the marketing says they do. They might save your equipment from a lightning strike a medium distance away, by absorbing the remnants of the surge that get to you - only once or twice before the protector is dead! - they will not save your equipment from anything that lasts longer than that.

alentred 2 hours ago

> 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.

Romario77 an hour ago

US typically has the whole office with UPS and diesel generators (if it is important enough to do so).

KennyBlanken 32 minutes ago

No, this isn't remotely "typical." You have no idea what you're talking about.

The building might be on a generator. The whole building is most assuredly not on UPS.

Even in hospitals only certain outlets are on UPS - the stuff that absolutely cannot be interrupted - though a lot of hospital equipment now has its own battery system, at least in part for convenience.

I don't know if it's still done but semiconductor plants used to use intertia-based grid smoothing/UPS systems to handle millisecond-level interrupts and voltage fluctuations.

someonebaggy 39 minutes ago

I've never seen them in France. I've seen them in a chemistry lab section of a university in New Zealand and I believe they're also common in data centers, NOCs, etc. worldwide.

KennyBlanken 39 minutes ago

But all the nuclear power bros told me electricity in France is uber reliable and bountiful because it's all nuclear! We need nuclear power plants for a stable grid!

It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...

Putting computer systems on UPSs isn't a Europe thing. Backup generators and UPS units are very common, or at least they were until everyone got infatuated with moving all their data "into the cloud" and stopped maintaining, or building, infrastructure in office space for it.

Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.

But hey, it was cheaper, right?

Oops...

groos 5 hours ago

The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.

notRobot 5 hours ago

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.

sixo 5 hours ago

They just need to be educated not to touch the wires. As it happens they figured it out pretty quick

sbmthakur 5 hours ago

Concerns about animal welfare are increasing and as a result are being factored into infrastructure projects. Better late than never.

Also it would also avoid such incidents.

Minister blames monkey for Sri Lanka nationwide power cut

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8d92n28pqjo

Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/samruddhi-fo...

sharts 3 hours ago

Agreed. And nothing is stopping folks from running underground cables except crying about it being more expensive (i.e the true cost vs side effects to other populations so long as it doesn’t affect the consumers).

It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.

someonebaggy 36 minutes ago

To be fair, it's a lot more expensive, and these are not rich places we're talking about.

thelastgallon 7 hours ago

India has one thing going for it, sunlight all the time.

India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.

Rooftop is known and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.

Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.

Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.

Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.

Lots of scope for growth.

idiotsecant 7 hours ago

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

pbmonster 6 hours ago

How did you get that number? Is this just a quip about batteries?

Most of India has a solar capacity factor >0.2 and low seasonality. That means even 5kW peak rooftop panels and a 10 kWh battery will get you over 95% almost always. And panels+labor is so cheap in India, there's really no reason not to just tile the roof in panels.

Things get more difficult in dense cities, if you have multi story apartment blocks going 90+% locally is impossible. But then just transmit power from lower density rooftops, or actual solar farms.

And this already assumes widespread AC (really no way to increase electrification this much and not add AC in that climate).

triceratops 6 hours ago

1/3 of anything is a lot.

davedigerati 2 hours ago

til: ≥(1/3)==lot

toomuchtodo 6 hours ago

Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity: India - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

India’s Clean Energy Boom Halts Coal Power Growth - https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Indias-Cl... - September 18th, 2026

Ember Energy: India - https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/india/ - Last Updated: June 4th, 2026

Ember Energy: Battery storage is now cheap enough to unleash India’s full solar potential - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-... - April 7th, 2026 ("Ember’s analysis shows how solar and battery storage can meet as much as 90% of India’s electricity demand at lower LCOE than the average power purchase costs in most states.")

- Solar and batteries could supply 90% of India’s electricity demand at a competitive LCOE of around INR 5.06/kWh ($56/MWh).

- 4.9 GW of solar and 13.5 GWh of battery capacity for every 1 GW average demand load is enough to meet 83-92% of annual electricity demand in the ten largest states.

- 7 of India’s largest states by electricity demand can meet 90-92% of their demand with solar and batteries at an LCOE between INR 4.96–5.09/kWh ($55–56/MWh).

Ember Energy: India’s electrotech fast-track: where China built on coal, India is building on sun - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-... - January 22nd, 2026

- 27% of India’s electricity was generated from clean sources in 2025. It was the 3rd largest country by electricity demand.

- As of March 2026, India was one of only ten countries planning to triple non-fossil generation capacity from 2022 levels by 2030. By December 2025, the country had achieved 258 GW of installed renewables capacity, making progress towards its 2030 goal of 500 GW. Ember analysis suggests that, under current plans, renewables would reach 42% of generation by 2030.

dyauspitr 37 minutes ago

5 INR/kWh? That can’t be right, that’s ridiculously cheap at $0.04/kWh.

someonebaggy 35 minutes ago

How are wages?

toomuchtodo 26 minutes ago

'Offensively cheap': solar power is looking up - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695304 - September 2026 (81 comments)

Interesting solar PV facts (as of this comment):

- Wood Mackenzie estimates Chinese solar manufacturing capacity at roughly 1.36TW.

- By the end of 2025, installed small-scale solar capacity worldwide had reached ~1.2TW.

- While solar does not generate at full capacity around the clock, the installed total is about three times the size of the global nuclear fleet.

- Ember Energy expects Africa to add about 17GW of solar this year.

- In the Philippines, rooftop solar capacity may have nearly doubled in the 12 months through April, rooftop systems generated 372 gigawatt hours in the first six months of the year and residential systems can now pay for themselves there in a little more than three years.

- India is scaling rooftop systems through a national subsidy program launched in February 2024. The program has installed panels on more than 5 million homes and is adding about 500,000 homes a month.

ghm2180 6 hours ago

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.

darkwizard42 30 minutes ago

Would argue it is even coming to Tier 3 cities (personal experience from Rourkela, Odisha where I feel like rooftop solar has exploded in the last 5 years)

zeristor 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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).

skeletal88 7 hours ago

https://energiatalgud.ee/V%C3%B5rgukaod%3A_elekter?category=...

'kaod' is losses, this table shows losses from bruto production.

Either someone has been sending wrong data to the world bank or there is some issue with interpreting them before importing to world bank.

rpozarickij 7 hours ago

Interestingly, this page seems to contain data only until year 2014, but the graph next to Estonia in the grandparent link does show an increase on the right side. Maybe Estonia did indeed experience some changes in overall distribution loss in recent years?

card_zero 7 hours ago

Up from about 6% in 2015-2020 according to the World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS?location...

But at 2.9% according to Eesti's electricity supplier: https://www.elering.ee/en/electricity-consumption-and-genera...

"In 2024, losses accounted for 2.9% of the total amount of electricity supplied to the transmission system." What does it all mean, who knows.

lrasinen 5 hours ago

Elering reports only their part, the very high voltage transmission losses. Then there are the distribution losses on the local level are they're about 4%.

https://www.ceer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/3rd-CEER-Repo...

dlisboa 7 hours ago

The article also says Brazil's "problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago", which is very incorrect from what they're describing. Almost none of what is described in the article happened in Brazil 20 years ago, let alone today. Energy theft, for instance, happens here but at a minuscule scale compared to what's on the article.

I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.

It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.

zeristor 3 hours ago

I did query ChatGPT and it seemingly wrong headedly suggested that Estonia had closed lots of Oil Shale power which it did have, I am not too up on this.

I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.

The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.

"Oh, you sweet summer child"

dspillett 8 hours 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.

skeletal88 7 hours ago

In Estonia we def do not over generate by that amount.

dspillett 6 hours ago

It doesn't need to be that amount, just a significant amount, to be worth mentioning. Though even if that much were true, you would have unusually high electricity bills at home¹.

----

[1] much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets.

rebuilder 7 hours ago

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.

searine 5 hours ago

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.

downrightmike 4 hours ago

name one start up

whatever1 9 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 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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.

lesuorac 7 hours ago

How is creating your own ETFs to avoid paying taxes low effort?

I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.

philipallstar 7 hours ago

You'll see a load of people on benefits being tax-negative, though. If paying taxes is your measure, then an honest assessment of who pays taxes wouldn't land you at the ultra-rich.

sirtaj 7 hours ago

One of the funniest ideas I heard was that we in South Asia do corruption properly, because unlike the West, even the poorest person gets to be corrupt while in the West you have to have money and know people. Democracy!

scottyah 5 hours ago

It's just not true at all though, and I don't get where the meme comes from other than the politicians pointing their fingers at the rich so we don't look at them. If there wasn't incentive to be homeless, we wouldn't have so many.

mixdup 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

If a utility is regulated to a set profit outcome, it will make a profit on stolen electricity just via math.

mixdup 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

> The ones who pay will pay.

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

whatever1 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

Indeed, you need to insure from the risk of brick-rain where this weather phenomenon occurs!

vagrantJin 3 hours ago

A failed state is a funny thing. It cannot fail indefinitely and yet it persists in a limbo.

inglor_cz 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

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

electroweak 6 hours ago

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.

SoftTalker 5 hours ago

> accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence

I assumed it was something like that when I saw the graph for Singapore. They achieve the veneer of a perfectly clean and orderly society by punitive intolerance of anything else.

bob1029 4 hours ago

You can cause a lot of harm by breaking infrastructure. 10 years in prison is a bit extreme for an accident but it obviously has the desired effect. The current penalty in my part of town seems to be $0 and no time behind bars. My fiber optic internet is cut about once every 2-3 months.

I wonder if something in the middle could work. I feel like if you are legally responsible for a construction job and dig into the forbidden spaghetti that a little bit of mandatory community service isn't exactly an extreme response.

delta_p_delta_x an hour ago

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.

boringg 8 hours 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 8 hours 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.

thumbsup-_- 7 hours ago

I grew up in Delhi during the 90s. We used to have daily power cuts but starting around year 2000 (can't pin exact year), we started having less outages. Since around 2006, we had almost no outages throughout the year. Now, I haven't experienced a power outage in a long time in Delhi

nibnalin 7 hours ago

I was curious if the price per unit of electricity has also changed over this time period, looks like that's been pretty much flat: https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D

(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)

newyankee 7 hours ago

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.

kamikazechaser 3 hours ago

Surprised to see my former university director/lecturer appear on HN. She (the author) was very controversial and general not liked towards the end of her tenure by most of my peers. Nonetheless, she was quite good in her field.

tarun_anand 6 hours ago

The next 25 years will see another revolution, the solar residential (and hopefully commercial one) https://pmsuryaghar.gov.in/#/

The government is actively encouraging solar residential and net metering is on...

Since the topic is linked to Delhi..

In dino, garche dakkan mein hain kadre sukhan bahut,

Kaun jaye Zauq, par dilli ki galiya chodd ke

The poet acknowledges that the Deccan region (South India) currently offers better patronage and respect for poets than the declining Delhi. However, he rhetorically asks who could possibly bear to leave Delhi....

downrightmike 4 hours ago

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

dyauspitr 34 minutes ago

Transfer panels aren’t all that expensive and required by code.

pm90 39 minutes ago

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

ivewonyoung 9 hours 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 7 hours ago

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

mc32 9 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.

Gangway0829 9 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.

leosanchez 9 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 9 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 9 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.

philipallstar 9 hours ago

Definitely not nearly as vile. It certainly wasn't perfect, particularly things like the awful penal colonies, but jump-starting a giant civilisation, say, 1000+ years into the future is not straightforward either. India is experiencing a rise in nationalism, but would do well to imagine the counterfactual of what India would be like had Europe never visited.

ivell 8 hours ago

> jump-starting a giant civilisation, say, 1000+ years into the future is not straightforward either.

Not sure what you are suggesting here.

Gangway0829 8 hours ago

It's pretty clear lol. OP definitely thinks we were living in mud huts before the British gifted us railroads.

philipallstar 7 hours ago

1000 years ago is not mud huts. Although in terms of civics and rights I would say India seems quite a lot further back than 1000 years, if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick.

triceratops 7 hours ago

> Although in terms of civics and rights I would say India seems quite a lot further back than 1000 years

How so?

> if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick

You mean the slave owners? Who only allowed free men to vote? And required property ownership to hold office?

I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India, nor a requirement to own property to hold public office. Women are allowed to vote there. They've even had a woman be Prime Minister and two women Presidents.

philipallstar 3 hours ago

> I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India

Goodness, there was a huge amount of slavery, back into prehistory, then lots African slaves from the 6th century, then when Islamic conquest hit almost 1000 years ago many Indians were enslaved. Just as slavery was everywhere, it was in India. The big event was in 1843 when Britain did the moral thinking and emphasis to abolish it throughout their empire and also just in general, with British ships going to war against slaver ships and the British Empire buying slaves' freedom. The two big things about India and abolition were 1) the East India Company was definitely not as morally clear as the people in England, and 2) there was a worry that ending slavery in India would be too disruptive to the local culture, it was so embedded. So it was only abolished 10 years after the rest of the Empire.

Today, with 70 years of independence and self-rule, India has the most modern slaves in the world[0].

> Women are allowed to vote there.

Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations - some, like ancient Greece, almost 2000 years prior - who did all the discovery and moral thinking for this. It's not hard to copy something, particularly when declaring it to be so is what's measured, and not how well it's implemented.

[0] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...

triceratops 3 hours ago

Quite a motte and bailey there. You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece. Then when I pointed out all the ways in which ancient Greece was backward you began comparing to something else. To be clear: ancient Greece, the "fountain of democracy" had legal slavery. Modern India does not.

The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....

And that's even counting Mauritania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania

"Countries with large populations have large numbers of people doing <insert illegal act>" is hardly a revelation.

> Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations

So weird that those "moral" British didn't allow Indians to vote before that. I thought you said they were the good guys!

No extant country has adopted democracy from first principles. Everyone copy-pasted it. 1950 was the first time India had the choice and chance to do it, and they took it.

philipallstar an hour ago

> You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece

No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.

> The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....

Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.

triceratops 8 hours ago

> jump-starting a giant civilisation, say, 1000+ years into the future is not straightforward either

The various East India companies went to India (and the other east Indies) because those places had things rich Europeans desired - spices yes, but also high-end, high-quality textiles and handcrafted items. They were already the height of civilization and had high economic productivity.

> would do well to imagine the counterfactual of what India would be like had Europe never visited

It would probably not be one country. Best case scenario: like a South Asian EU. Why do you think they wouldn't have copied European industrialization and developed themselves? Japan did it. Turkey did it.

Speaking of Japan, isn't it interesting that the first Asian country to industrialize is also one of the only Asian countries never colonized by Europeans? Why do people still believe colonization was good for economic development?

bell-cot 7 hours ago

> Speaking of Japan, ...

IIR, Japan was a pretty xenophobic, unified, and militarized place when the Europeans showed up. And without either reputed or obvious Tier 1 riches - such as Central & South America's precious metals - to motivate a hard-fought conquest. Especially when 'most everywhere else in South & East Asia was comparatively easy pickings.

> Why do people still believe ...

Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was. And picking those metrics feels pretty good, if you identify uncomfortably closely with that sort of capitalism.

triceratops 7 hours ago

> Japan was a pretty xenophobic, unified, and militarized place when the Europeans showed up.

Other than unified, that describes most places in the 15th or 16th century.

> Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was.

The one country in Asia* to not suffer colonialism (Japan) is way ahead of all the others that did have it, especially on "Eurocentric" metrics such as GDP and productivity and democracy and human rights. That alone should be a rebuke to colonialism's purported development powers.

* Arguably Thailand is another but it was forced to cede land to colonial powers. It too is considerably richer than its immediate neighbors.

inglor_cz 4 hours ago

The one country in Asia to not suffer colonialism (Japan) is way ahead of all the others that did have it, especially on "Eurocentric" metrics such as GDP and productivity and democracy and human rights. That alone should be a rebuke to colonialism's purported development powers.

I don't think this is a good example, given the actual modern history of Japan.

Contemporary Japanese democracy and respect for human rights aren't indigenous Japanese developments. They were literally forced on Japan by the victorious Americans after the homegrown Japanese militarist empire, which didn't GAF about either, catastrophically lost a major war.

triceratops 4 hours ago

Industrialization wasn't an "indigenous Japanese development" either. Other than Britain, every country had to import the industrial revolution.

Japan could only start that war because of its early industrialization. Colonies didn't start WW2.

In an alternate historical timeline where Japan industrializes but doesn't start the war? It would need to have had less militaristic and xenophobic leadership in the early 20th century than it did in our timeline. And IMO that would've led to more democracy* and human rights anyway over time.

*Important to note: Even pre-WW2 Japan went from absolute monarchy to a semi-constitutional monarchy, with suffrage for all adult males granted in 1925.

collabs 9 hours 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.

Gangway0829 9 hours ago

I think that's a bad read of Indian institutions. They are incredibly powerful - in fact, they are far too powerful. That's the problem. The license raj is the epitome of authoritarian, centralized political and economic power. I suppose it was justified on socialist grounds, but it would be fair to say that saying so doesn't make it so! Before 91, nothing, and I mean nothing, could happen without government say-so.

The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.

collabs 8 hours ago

I apologize I am not very good at expressing myself. Could India be better? Of course! Anyone can be better than what they are. Like a fish that lives in water doesn't ever think about water, an Indian living in India does not think about the absurdity of how powerful a District Collector / District Magistrate (DM) / Deputy Commissioner (DC) is in contemporary India.

> I think that's a bad read of Indian institutions. They are incredibly powerful - in fact, they are far too powerful. That's the problem. The license raj is the epitome of authoritarian, centralized political and economic power. I suppose it was justified on socialist grounds, but it would be fair to say that saying so doesn't make it so! Before 91, nothing, and I mean nothing, could happen without government say-so. > The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.

What you are saying is absolutely true. the bureaucracy in India is absolutely lazy, corrupt, powerful, and centralized. It is also arguably one of the biggest reasons why India has never had a (successful) military coup. You could even argue the inefficiency and the sluggishness of the bureaucracy is a feature and not a defect.

Gangway0829 8 hours ago

I think this is a self-deprecating canard that's oft-repeated, but I think fails the credibility test and encourages a kind of fatalistic resigned attitude among Indians. Are we to take from this that efficient bureaucracies lead inevitably to coups? Is the pathetic state of most African countries a result of their stellar bureaucracies?

mc32 9 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).

sirtaj 9 hours ago

The privatisation of Delhi power distribution was initiated by a Congress state government in 2000.

Gangway0829 9 hours 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.

sirtaj 9 hours ago

It's not surprising. For one, stated vs actual goals always differ and someone needs pockets to reach into. For the other, plenty of countries that listened to orgs like the World Bank saying "privatise everything immediately and reap the benefits!" just ended up handing the assets to cronies. Examples like Russia are of course well-known, but it's obviously happening under BJP in India as well.

Gangway0829 8 hours ago

It's once again lamentable, but somewhat predictable that even on a post about how privatization fixed, in five years, a problem that persisted for 50, you insist on spreading boogeyman tales about privatization. The Indian government is what American libertarians are afraid of, and in their defense, they should be afraid.

sirtaj 8 hours ago

Boogeyman? Is the outcome of the World Bank's insistence on "structural adjustments" somehow in debate now?

I was in Delhi when this started and they began laying out the tamper-proof cable back in the early 2000s. At that time, railway food had been privatised, perhaps you recall. It wasn't better. The problem was not the privatisation or lack thereof, it was the complete lack of accountability.

Gangway0829 8 hours ago

I'm not referring to the World Bank, but rather the idea that BJP's privatization push is somehow benefiting cronies. This is a widely reported accusation by the INC, but like most of their accusations, it seems to be a matter of slinging mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Part of accountability is the possibility for failure and the associated consequences. PSUs have no fear of failure, since they're fundamentally parasitic, living as they are on the tax receipts of the beleaguered middle class. Private industry either increases efficiency to the point of profit, or goes under, simple as. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the results!

Of course, if there is complete government capture by industry, then there is no more risk of failure, and you have privatized PSUs. But let's say this, from 1947-1991, India traded the British for the IAS. Hardly much of an improvement. The only way to reduce their power is to transfer it to the private sector, outside of areas where the utility of the activity is all externality (e.g. defense, scientific research). We have to move in this direction or risk returning to the License Raj era. Perhaps this will create more problems, but at least our children won't curse us for leaving them with our parents' problems.

sirtaj 8 hours ago

We're going to go back to the original point you made that you don't understand why privatisation is going so slowly. And I will reiterate that there are good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are visible, like Adani winning every coal tender in every BJP state, or the contractors (privatised) who make shit roads so they can then get paid to repair them. The good reasons are the ones I stated and you've touched on - you don't just give away the family jewels, you make sure that the recipient is strongly incentivised to do a better job. Just "oh they need to make money so it will be better" is too nebulous to mean anything. What is the incentive for a railway caterer to do a better job if he won't get pulled up for substandard food?

Saw the same thing playing out in public transport in a few different countries, incidentally. London railways are a particularly hilarious example of what happens when you privatise without proper accountability.

sirtaj 7 hours ago

Speaking of the IAS, my grandfather went smoothly from being an honest and principled ICS officer to being an IAS one. A contractor had his mother murdered because he wouldn't take a bribe for an illegal transport licence. That had nothing to do with socialism or capitalism, and neither ism will magically fix a society where that barely raises an eyebrow.

khriss 8 hours ago

> you insist on spreading boogeyman tales about privatization

Dude, you're the one coming across as a zealot here.

triceratops 7 hours ago

Privatization doesn't fix shit. Competition does. A private monopoly is just as bad as the government.

adrianN 4 hours ago

Arguably it’s worse.

SanjayMehta 9 hours ago

The BJP is marginally less socialist than the Congress. On the positive side, they are definitely less corrupt than the Congress.

inglor_cz 8 hours ago

Has the Congress moved to the right?

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

khriss 8 hours ago

Really? The recent headlines would suggest otherwise.

anarazel 9 hours ago

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

bluGill 9 hours 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 8 hours 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

bluGill 8 hours ago

Correct. As I recall the did a customer survey and customers didn't like (among other things) the number of power outages. The main goal was fixing that, and several side effects of that resulting in less line loss.

dopa42365 7 hours ago

It's mostly about the distance, isn't it? Iirc even with the most modern ultra high voltage lines, it's about 3% per 1000km. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad, even for really long distances (like solar power from some desert to where people actually live).

bluGill 7 hours ago

Distance is a factor. I do not know what they were measuring (the main power plant was about 1000km away, but I don't know if they counted that or if that was ignored because someone else owned those lines). They were a fairly rural utility with most of the area belonging to farmers (but they do have a couple suburbs and a few small towns).

I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.

olmo23 9 hours ago

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

yorwba 9 hours 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.

NicoJuicy 8 hours 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 8 hours 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.

inglor_cz 8 hours 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.

masklinn 8 hours 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.

csours 4 hours ago

> 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.

ayushiyerji 5 hours ago

This is going to get a lot of press and it does not mention any ministers or government services. The guy who wrote it is getting transferred in a week.

ghm2180 6 hours ago

Well written. It describes the problem at a fairly high level for engineers to understand and for lay people to see how public policy works when it does.

hn_submit 5 hours ago

They don't mean "loss" but "outages" if I read it correctly.

db48x 4 hours ago

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.

inemesitaffia 4 hours ago

Includes loss due to theft

noisy_boy 8 hours 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 8 hours ago

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

leosanchez 9 hours ago

Vajpayee FTW?

burntsand123 5 hours ago

This is because of the Modi government pro development agenda which is also what pushed India to the 21st century (and beyond).

Although they were some mistakes his government made all in all it’s been a huge success compared to the previous administrations in India.