About the Indian Grid Hierarchy:

Indian power system is operated as ve Regional grids viz., Northern Regional grid (NR), Western Regional grid (WR), Eastern Regional grid (ER), Southern Regional grid (SR) and North Eastern Regional grid (NER). The control of the grid is planned to be done at four levels of hierarchy namely 1. National Load Despatch Center (NLDC) 2. Regional Load Despatch Center (RLDC) 3. State Load Despatch Center (SLDC) and 4. Area Load Despatch Center (ALDC) http://www.desismartgrid.com/2012/08/indian-power-grid-blackout-reasons-and-futurerequirements/2/ [National Load Dispatch Centre (NLDC) was formed in Delhi in 2009 to manage the interregional exchanges, in addition to the existing Regional Load Dispatch Centres (RLDCs) which had been managing the intra-regional power balance. These load dispatch centres (LDCs) are autonomous subsidiaries of the public sector Transmission System Operator (TSO) called the Power Grid Corporation of India. Their priority is to ensure generation-load balance throughout the network. The arteries for these cross-country flows are a network of 400 kV transmission lines. During the first wave of electricity reforms in India in the early 1990s, the plan to connect the regional grids into a national grid was conceptualised, following which all regional grids, except the southern region achieved interconnectivity. The synchronous operation of these regional grids, forming the combined grid called the North-East-West (NEW) Grid, eases the power exchanges among these geographic regions to manage the surplus and deficit generation. A power transmission superhighway was commissioned to tightly link these regions together. This corridor which is made up of high capacity lines connecting Agra and Gwalior in the west, to Sasaram in Bihar in the east, allow voluminous flows of power from thermal power stations in the east to the load centres in the west and north. Whenever the demand in a regional grid exceeds the supply, the frequency of the grid tends to drop.To compensate, the generators all over the interconnected system start pumping more power into the network which then requires more power to be transmitted over the transmission lines. Carrying power above the rated capacity of the transmission lines results in increased thermal stresses and when the safety limits are crossed, a protective shutdown of the lines is activated. In turn, this partial shutdown of some of the grid connectors may lead to yet more stress and the subsequent shutdown of the other lines in the network, followed by turning off of generators and eventually causing a blackout. The sequence of events in July 2012 closely resembled this classic spiral breakdown effect of a power system. http://esi.nus.edu.sg/publications/2013/04/24/india-s-blackouts-of-july-2012-what-happenedand-why-] NR-ER-NER-WR (termed as NEW grid) connected synchronously, thus maintains same frequency SR connected asynchronously with the NEW grid through a HVDC links In all, there are 5 regional grids, 31 state grids and 100 plus area-wise grids in India. Further, internal to area grids, local distribution area grids are also available. Each grid has its own dispatch center.

The mechanism has been extended recently to intra-state level. At present the states are the participants in the central ABT scheduling mechanism. The RLDCs issue day-ahead schedules in coordination with the states and states have to conform to these fixed schedules on the day of operation. Any deviations are accounted for by the Unscheduled Interchange (UI) mechanism as a part of ABT. The UI rate is a function of system frequency at the time of operation, the definition of which is updated time to time by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC). The blackout-1 on 30-July-2012 (around 2:33hrs) occurred in the NR grid followed by blackout2 on 31-July-2012 (around 13:00 hrs) which occurred in the NEW grid, after the NR was restored from the previous black-out and synchronized with the NEW grid. There was also some low significance tripping events during 30-July-2012 and 31-July-2012. Blackout-1: Most of the media coverage on the issue of the black-out-1 cite over-drawl of power by Northern states as the reason. The over-drawl may be due to the frequency approaching 50.46 Hz just before the event, which provides apparently free power to the over-drawing states as per the UI mechanism. This happened to overload the transmission lines, resulting in line tripping and power re-routing through the other connecting lines. This led to a cascading line trippings, thus isolating NR from the rest of the NEW grid. Whereas WR-ER-NER survived the situation, NR failed! Around 300 million people were affected. The blackout had spread across Nine North Indian States, including the capital city, New Delhi. As per NLDC report, the antecedent conditions confirm the inoperation of 400 kV Gwalior Agra (ckt-2) and 400 kV Zerda Kankroli. As explained above, overdrawl by northern states overloaded and thus tripped 400 kV Gwalior Agra (ckt-1), and impedance between WR and NR suddenly increased. With no direct tie between NR and WR, the only link between the two is through ER. After about 3.35 seconds, the angular separation between WR and NR was gradually increasing which is confirmed by the recorded frequency differential of about 0.14 Hz (substantially constant) between Mumbai and Kanpur. At this point the ER NR ties would have snapped, owing to overloading with the re-routed power to separate the NR from the rest of the system. Blackout-2: The reason for this black-out can be a sudden load pick-up in NR during the afternoon which caused a overloading and subsequent cascade tripping of transmission ties with WR and ER. The NR not learning a lesson from the previous day black-out were again the culprit, committing the crime of overdrawing in a system which has just recovered a major black-out. Besides NR getting isolated from the rest of the NEW grid, over-speeding of generators in the ER and NER caused generators in these regions to trip resulting in a bigger black-out spreading across three regions affecting 640 million people altogether.

Why only the Northern states in the NEW grid were affected? WR is the only region in the NEW grid which has survived. Many of the experts in the internal Indian technical forums say that the survival is mere luck. However, when we thought on seriously for the reason, we have found some very interesting facts. We have recollected the discussions we had with Maharashtra state load dispatch center (comes under WR) in June12. Maharashtra is the main load center in the western region with more than 15GW load met on daily average basis and also a participant in the central ABT/UI mechanism. All the Indian states fall under the same model of central ABT/UI mechanism (i.e frequency linked structure) and some have envisaged to extend it to the intra-state level for the settlement of imbalances during the day of operation. However, the only state in the India happens to be Maharashtra in WR which has actually implemented a marginal cost based settlement for real-time imbalances (Intra ABT). Due to the marginal cost based settlement, the constituents (DISCOMS, captive power plants, independent power producers, etc.) in the Maharashtra state are discouraged from overdrawing the free power during the high grid frequency periods (>50.2Hz). If they overdraw during those periods, the state will penalize them indirectly by making them pay the merit order based marginal cost prevailing at that point of time. DesiSmartGrid believes that this might be the prime reason that has helped the WR not to overdraw during those critical times of the grid and made grid remain secure. We confirmed this outcome after studying the states UI schedule/drawl behaviour before & after the blackouts.