India suffers worst ­power crisis in years

Indians are cranking up air conditioning as they still work from home, while lights come back on in offices and factories with an end to COVID curbs, upending power demand patterns amid a heatwave and the country’s worst blackouts in years.

India has traditionally seen peak demand late in the evening when people head back home but that has shifted to mid-afternoon when temperatures are hottest, government data shows, driven by record residential daytime use, a pick-up in industrial work, and more use of irrigation pumps to tap higher solar supply.

Relentless daytime demand in the world’s third-biggest power market means utilities have been unable to ease output even over peak solar power supply periods, further straining grids already overwhelmed due to the heatwave baking swathes of South Asia.

For power producers in India, this has led to a larger-than-usual drawdown in coal inventories, leaving them under-stocked ahead of the hottest part of the year, with disruptions to coal supply lines due to rail car shortages adding to their woes.

The power crunch in India highlights potential challenges for other nations in the region such as Pakistan and Bangladesh with even smaller generation capacities.

Pakistan too has been facing severe outages with some rural areas getting as few as six hours of electricity per day.-Fin24