How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent

One key factor not directly mentioned in the article is the simple alignment of financial incentives when electricity distribution was privatized. Before privatization, the agencies responsible for collecting electricity bills had little incentive to actually perform the collection. When coupled with rampant corruption, you get a situation where a lot of bills are either getting unpaid or not even being generated and just being written off as transmission and distribution losses. Switching to private distribution immediately aligns the incentives of the distributor to actually bill their customers for the electricity they are using. None of this is meant to take away from the value of the technical and policy work that led to improvements, and I'm sure all of the factors called out in the article also contributed to this change.

I wonder how many HNers recall life in Delhi even 20 years ago? Cutting electricity loss is one thing, but getting rid of "load shedding" (unplanned power cuts) is the really revolutionary part. It was not uncommon for the power to go out several times a day and you had to rush to unplug expensive appliances (TV, laptop), because when the power came back it was often accompanied by a surge. My office was wired with two sets of electrical sockets, one connected to grid mains and the other connected to the UPS (for important equipment only).

> The losses in Delhi weren’t caused solely by technical problems. Theft of electricity was rampant, by both the powerful and the powerless (in both senses of the word). Businesses, residential customers, and utility employees with vested interests would siphon electricity from the grid. It was easy to illegally hook into a streetlight or a distribution line running close to one’s house or factory. Utilities didn’t have the resources to identify theft or penalize offenders.

In general, once "everyone" is breaking a rule, more people break the rule too. Or to put it more bluntly; if everyone is breaking a rule, you should too.

The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.

India has one thing going for it, sunlight all the time.

India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.

Rooftop is known and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.

Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.

Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.

Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.

Lots of scope for growth.

I bet much of the savings is from reducing theft. 50 percent is too much for transmission losses.

In the industry, transmission and distribution losses are called T&D losses. Pretty much all unaccounted losses will be written off as T&D losses. Often the right expansion for T&D losses is Theft and Decoity losses :-)

Estonia?!

Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.

In Greece there is no incentive to fix power losses since the electric bill has a power losses line item.

You can steal as much as you want. The ones who pay will pay.

I want to know what Singapore's grid operators have been up to. That seems to be the more interesting story based on the data in this article.

So basically theft and fixing overloaded infra. So this is policy based solutions for the most part.

Amazing that places have 50% power loss.

I grew up in Delhi during the 90s. We used to have daily power cuts but starting around year 2000 (can't pin exact year), we started having less outages. Since around 2006, we had almost no outages throughout the year. Now, I haven't experienced a power outage in a long time in Delhi

I was curious if the price per unit of electricity has also changed over this time period, looks like that's been pretty much flat: https://ibb.co/8DLPn25D

(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)

The next 25 years will see another revolution, the solar residential (and hopefully commercial one) https://pmsuryaghar.gov.in/#/

The government is actively encouraging solar residential and net metering is on...

Since the topic is linked to Delhi..

In dino, garche dakkan mein hain kadre sukhan bahut,

Kaun jaye Zauq, par dilli ki galiya chodd ke

The poet acknowledges that the Deccan region (South India) currently offers better patronage and respect for poets than the declining Delhi. However, he rhetorically asks who could possibly bear to leave Delhi....

Surprised to see my former university director/lecturer appear on HN. She (the author) was very controversial and general not liked towards the end of her tenure by most of my peers. Nonetheless, she was quite good in her field.

> In areas where theft was particularly rampant and losses were as high as 83 percent, according to Tata, the companies took a different strategy. These pockets of Delhi were predominantly occupied by low-income families. Tata Power, and later BSES, worked to improve the water supply for these residents and provide educational opportunities, such as instruction in reading and writing in Hindi as well as financial literacy. These efforts focused on the women, who were at home more, and paid them to collect electricity payments from their neighbors. Bill payment rates from these areas are now on par with those of other parts of Delhi

This is... interesting on multiple levels.

That’s quite the achievement. Though a side note of comparison I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range. Unless I’m misunderstanding what that means, it seems excessive for a modern economy.

This is going to get a lot of press and it does not mention any ministers or government services. The guy who wrote it is getting transferred in a week.

Well written. It describes the problem at a fairly high level for engineers to understand and for lay people to see how public policy works when it does.

They don't mean "loss" but "outages" if I read it correctly.

tldr; they passed the administration of power from the corrupt government officials to Tata power (part of the Tata conglomerate) and BSES (part of another conglomerate Reliance). They modernized the setup and closed loopholes and avenues of corruption and also made stealing of power by the corrupt sections of public difficult.

Vajpayee FTW?

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This is because of the Modi government pro development agenda which is also what pushed India to the 21st century (and beyond).

Although they were some mistakes his government made all in all it’s been a huge success compared to the previous administrations in India.