Infinite Unknown

- Bolivia nationalises Iberdrola electricity companies (Reuters, Dec 29, 2012):

Bolivia nationalised two electricity distribution companies owned by Spanish utility Iberdrola on Saturday, the latest move by leftist President Evo Morales to assert control over the country’s resources.

Iberdrola will be compensated according to a valuation to be drawn up by an independent arbiter, Morales said, adding that the measure was aimed at enhancing rural energy services.

“We considered this measure necessary to ensure equitable energy tariffs … and to see to it that the quality of electricity service is uniform in rural as well as urban areas,” Morales said.

President Morales has nationalised oil, telecommunications, mining and electrical generation companies.

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Tags: Bolivia, Economy, electricity, Energy, Evo Morales, Global News, Government, Politics, Society

- Full power restored after India hit by second huge outage (CNN, Aug 1, 2012)

Tags: electricity, Global News, India, Society, Technology

- India’s Power Network Breaks Down (Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2012):

Second Blackout This Week Affects Area Where 680 Million Live, Embarrassing Nation by Exposing Ramshackle Grid

NEW DELHI—India suffered the world’s biggest-ever power outage Tuesday as transmission networks serving areas inhabited by 680 million collapsed, putting the nation’s ramshackle infrastructure on stark display.

The grid failure, the second massive blackout in as many days, happened around 1 p.m. local time and affected 18 states and two union territories in north and eastern India, grinding trains across large swaths of the country to a halt, forcing thousands of hospitals and factories to operate on generators, temporarily stranding hundreds of coal miners underground and causing losses to businesses estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The government said power was about 80% restored in north India by late Tuesday evening.

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Tags: Collapse, electricity, Global News, Government, India, Politics, Society, Technology

- Worst India Outage Highlights 60 Years of Missed Targets: Energy (Businessweek, Aug 1, 2012):

Tags: Collapse, electricity, Global News, India, Society, Technology

- Behind India’s Grid Breakdown, Deeper Energy Issues – and Opportunities (New York Times, July 31, 2012):

Here’s a look at the world’s biggest blackout and India’s underlying energy challenge by someone who works to bring electricity to the hundreds of millions of Indian citizens for whom the grid failures are an abstraction because they were never on the grid to begin with.

In June, at a summit in Manila on Asia’s energy future, I met Harish Hande, an award-winning Indian engineer and entrepreneur based in Bangalore who, since 1995, has built a company that provides energy assessments and solar panels or other sources of locally generated power to (mainly) rural Indian communities. We had several long conversations about how to affordably provide electricity in countries like India and the Philippines, with vast poor populations, both rural and urban.

With much of the electrified half of India suddenly thrown into the dark, I re-visited video I shot of parts of our conversation. Here’s a portion that’s highly relevant, in which Hande explains that urgent calls now to fix the grid or speed the building of more coal-burning power plants are unlikely to ameliorate the energy challenges confronting hundreds of millions of citizens there:

YouTube

I also invited Hande this morning to reflect on the current debate over India’s various energy gaps, and opportunities. Here’s his “Your Dot” contribution

It’s interesting that the rich in the states without power are complaining the most, about how they are suffering because of no air conditioners, etcetera. Yet 400 million Indians today still have not seen a light bulb while 200 million more regularly suffer from regular brownouts (between 6 and 19 hours).
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Tags: electricity, Global News, India, Society, Technology

- This Is What 670 Million People Without Power Look Like: Pictures From A Blacked Out India (ZeroHedge, July 31, 2012)

Tags: Collapse, electricity, Global News, India, Society, Technology

- 600 million without power in India after 3 power grids fail (USA Today, July 31, 2012):

NEW DELHI (AP) – India’s energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity in one of the world’s biggest-ever blackouts.

Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.

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Tags: electricity, Global News, India, Technology

For your information.

See also:

- Study: Nuclear Meltdown In One Of The Reactors In Operation Worldwide Is Likely To Occur Once In 10 To 20 Years – Map Shows Risk Of Heavy Contamination

- Expert Warns: 100% Certainty of Total Catastrophic Failure of the Entire Power Infrastructure Within 3 Years

- Interview With Former US Army Intelligence Officer And Bestselling Author James Wesley Rawles: Global Economic Collapse – Gun Confiscation – How To Survive The End Of The World – If The Power Grid Goes Down We Are In A Massive Die Off Situation Where Literally More Than 50% Of The Population Of The Country Could Die In Just One Winter (Video)

- Super Storm = Breakdown Worldwide Grid System = Worldwide Nuclear Meltdown (Before It’s News, May 23, 2012):

Solar SuperStorms Coming…

As the sun boils up increased numbers of sunspots, we here on Earth need to be wary of the resultant solar flares and CME’s that are often hurled in our direction. An X-class solar flare can reach the Earth in just 8 minutes (CME’s, Coronal Mass Ejections, can take days). If an X-class flare… or Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun… is of sufficient magnitude… it could bring down our electrical power grid and end life as we know it…
for a long period of time… or forever…

A solar Super Storm of the size and duration of the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859 will down the world’s power grid infrastructure for years… Think about that for a minute… No food… water… gasoline… radio… internet…

In short: almost nothing will be left… Hundreds of millions in Europe and the US would surely die. But this is not all… All nuclear reactors will melt down… because the cooling of the reactors fails…. Thus, a Super Solarstorm has the potential to cause a Fukushima type accident at every nuclear power plant in the world!
And worse… The fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool will melt… Catch fire, and radioactive fission products will be released into the atmosphere… Because there is at least 10 times more spent fuel then in the reactors… The world will be confronted with the equivalent of thousands nuclear reactors melting down…! Will this be the end of human life on earth…? Continue reading »

Tags: CME, electricity, Energy, Food, Global News, Nuclear, Nuclear reactors, Sun, Technology, Water

For your information.

PDF:  Geomagnetic Storms, EMP and Nuclear Armageddon (Nexus Magazine Article)

- Geomagnetic Storms, EMP and Nuclear Armageddon (Nexus Magazine Article) (When Technology Fails):

There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more either under construction or in the planning stages. There are 104 of these reactors in the USA and 195 in Europe. Imagine what havoc it would wreak on our civilization and the planet’s ecosystems if we were to suddenly witness not just one or two nuclear melt-downs but 400 or more! How likely is it that our world might experience an event that could ultimately cause hundreds of reactors to fail and melt down at approximately the same time?  I venture to say that, unless we take significant protective measures, this apocalyptic scenario is not only possible but probable.

Consider the ongoing problems caused by three reactor core meltdowns, explosions, and breached containment vessels at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility, and the subsequent health and environmental issues. Consider the millions of innocent victims that have already died or continue to suffer from horrific radiation-related health problems (“Chernobyl AIDS”, epidemic cancers, chronic fatigue, etc) resulting from the Chernobyl reactor explosions, fires, and fallout. If just two serious nuclear disasters, spaced 25 years apart, could cause such horrendous environmental catastrophes,  it is hard to imagine how we could ever hope to recover from hundreds of similar nuclear incidents occurring simultaneously across the planet. Since more than one third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, this is a serious issue that should be given top priority![1]

In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck roughly 100 solar storms causing significant geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), two of which were powerful enough to rank as “extreme GMDs”. If an extreme GMD of such magnitude were to occur today, in all likelihood it would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at the vast majority of our world’s nuclear reactors, quite similar to the disasters at both Chernobyl and Fukushima, but multiplied over 100 times. When massive solar flares launch a huge mass of highly charged plasma (a coronal mass ejection, or CME) directly towards Earth, colliding with our planet’s outer atmosphere and magnetosphere, the result is a significant geomagnetic disturbance.

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Tags: Chernobyl, Chernobyl AIDS, electricity, Energy, Fukushima, Global News, Government, Japan, Nuclear, Nuclear reactors, Politics, Science, Solar Flare, Technology, Unemployment

- Romania uses army to save snow-trapped travellers (Reuters, Jan. 26, 2012):

* Temperatures expected to fall to -20C on Friday* PM says priority is to rescue stranded car travellers

* Blizzards also shut towns and port in Bulgaria (Updates rescue numbers, adds protests)

BUCHAREST — Romania has drafted in the army to rescue hundreds of travellers stranded by blizzards that dumped metres of snow on the ground on Thursday, derailing a train and forcing authorities to shut down motorways and ports and cancel flights.

Hundreds of schools were shut and by 2000 GMT dozens of towns and villages were still without electricity, as felled trees and strong winds brought down power lines.

Police and ambulance crews had rescued more than 1,600 people by Thursday evening but more than 1,000 cars were still snowed in on roads, Prime Minister Emil Boc said, and road authority officials were distributing tea and blankets.

Authorities have banned traffic on Romania’s only two motorways and several national roads until weather improved.

“I am asking you to not rest easy until you have made sure people’s lives are not in danger,” Prime Minister Boc told an emergency response meeting late on Thursday before heading out to capital Bucharest’s ringroad to inspect progress.

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Tags: Blizzards, Climate Change, electricity, Environment, Global Cooling, Global News, Government, Politics, Romania, Snow, Winter