Never thought the pandemic will bring up any questions for energy engineers. But when #energy minister of a state raises concerns, they should not be brushed aside. 1/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Every evening as all of us switch on lights, total load on the grid increases by about 17GW over about an hour. This is a jump of ~15% compared to average load. 2/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Thus, it would be realistic to expect a sudden drop of up to 10% on evening of 5th as we follow the words of @narendramodi. The rate of change will be much more than usual 3/n #IndiaFightsCorona
It should be noted that there are many instances of such rapid changes in demand. Remember when @sachin_rt used to get out, how most of us would switch their TVs off? 4/n #IndiaFightsCorona
If there is one soft skill I have learned over the years, it is to differentiate between those who #practice engineering and those who talk about it. 5/n #IndiaFightsCorona
One may have thousand complaints about power supply in India but catastrophic failures in our grid are rare. Engineers operating our grid are competent to say the least. 6/n #IndiaFightsCorona
As the event on 5th is pre-planned, our engineers can plan for it and I am sure they will handle it. I have already seen a action plan by one of the state grids. 7/n #IndiaFightsCorona
One valid point is why increase any kind of risk while our hands are full of problems? The real risk can only be assessed by those running the grid and I am sure they have been consulted 8/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Thats all there is to say as far as energy aspects are concerned. But this thing surely goes beyond that. 9/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Why lights instead of claps this time around? Isn't lighting candles enough to show solidarity? Why switch off the lights? 10/n #IndiaFightsCorona
I believe it goes beyond solidarity. @pmoindia is looking to gather some kind of feedback about people's participation. 11/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Grid data can give very good insight about geographical spread of people ready to act as per the government directives. 12/n #IndiaFightsCorona
The way oppositions parties have reacted to this, only confirms possibility of a second order effect they don’t like. 13/n #IndiaFightsCorona
The age when tech giants are listening to our personal conversations and privacy is a talking point at least when we are not bothered by a virus 14/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Some of the countries have gone to the level of tracking location of infected people to keep track of them as well as those around them. 15/n #IndiaFightsCorona
One thing we can say -without long confidentiality agreement- about grid data is that it is truly anonymized. 16/n #IndiaFightsCorona
When @google knows every damn detail about my life, I don’t mind sharing truly anonymized data with my government while I depend on it to handle a pandemic. 17/n #IndiaFightsCorona
Unsolicited advice for those concerned about grid or data, switch on all the fans while you switch off all the lights. 18/n #IndiaFightsCorona
PS: To all those raising concerns about grid stability, I hope you will be equally loud when someone calls for #earthhour 19/n #IndiaFightsCorona
