Blackouts illuminate India´s power problems

For two consecutive days in July, India experienced blackouts that took down large portions of the country´s power grid. The second outage was the largest in history, leaving more than 600 million people, nearly a tenth of the world´s population, without electricity. The blackouts brought renewed attention to the country´s power sector, which is struggling to supply India´s growing demand. They exposed weak links in the transmission system, inadequate fail-safe systems for preventing cascading failures, and a lack of proper outage planning.