I was reading the news paper this morning. As is common in the weekend, there was this regular headline which went like "Power Shutdown in Several Areas Today". The article went on to say that due to 66/11 kV "C" Station Maintenance Work, there will be no power in a large swathe of Bangalore in the general Shivaji Nagar area from 10 am to 6pm.
Now we are all familiar with this outage and have probably experienced it at some point of time or the other. Maintenance and preventive maintenance is always a good thing. So it is hard to complain about it. However, one question has always bothered me. In the nearly one decade that I spent outside the country, I have never seen anything like this. In fact, except for a few incidents where a tree branch touched a line or some other unforeseen incident like that, I have never lost power.
So, what is this maintenance work that (BESCOM or KPTCL?) does? How do other countries manage to supply power and yet maintain their electric transmission systems (at least based on my experience)?
Does anybody have an idea? I have not been able to find out yet and have no expertise to answer this question. Or is it that I was living in some utopian place and other places have outages like this?
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Comments
Redundancy
Distribution network can and should have redundancies that help bypass equipment under maintenance. Either such redundancy does not exist, or is not adequate. Same as our power production scene. Forget redundancy, we should be happy if we don't have rolling black-outs three times a day!