What if the entire country lost power?

Two weeks ago the power grid in northern India crashed leaving 370 million people without power for six to 12 hours. That more people than if the entire US and Canada went dark! And then a few days later, half the country lost power with over 600 million people affected.

India is used to daily power blackouts so "hospitals and major businesses have backup generators that seamlessly kick in during power cuts, and upscale homes are hooked to backup systems powered by truck batteries." Small businesses and the poor are not lucky and lack the funds for power backup. Some had to go without water as well pumps had no power to pump.

According to India’s Central Electricity Authority, demand for electricity during peak periods outstrips power generation by an average of 9 percent. So the system is overwhelmed and frequently fails, just not on the scale seen last month.  The government wants to spend $400 billion over the next five years on power-sector investment, adding 76 gigawatts of capacity by 2017. That’s on top of the 85 gigawatts of power India has added in the past 10 years. It's hard to keep up with growing demand.

A laptop in a storm

Instapundit has an interesting discussion about recharging your laptop or smart phone after a power blackout. Is is OK to use outlets at McDonalds, etc? But what really caught me eye was a comment by Johan Bakker who installs home generators:

there are still serious issues with generators and UPS [Universal Power Supply] units. Except for the largest and most-sophisticated generators, these two devices do not play well together... UPS makers have set very-narrow boundaries on the frequency input that their devices will tolerate before calling a fault. ... UPS makers use the disruption in frequency as a warning that utility power is going out [and switch to battery backup]

Most home generators cannot keep the power frequency stable to ± 0.5 Hz as required by UPS (and circuit breakers?). Bakker recommends inverters instead

for low-level charging needs, like phones and laptops, the best solution is a 12V auto battery and a miniature inverter. The battery can be charged in so many different ways (from a car, from a charger running off a generator, from a lawnmower, from a solar panel, the possible ways are endless) and even a small lead-acid battery (like a lawn-tractor battery) has more-than-enough capacity to charge many cell-phones and laptops before requiring a fresh charge.

Back-up Power

"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery."
-Erma Bombeck

One of the items on my to-do list is to get a backup power generator. But there are so many issues and questions. What size, how does it work? And there are dangers: it must be used outdoors, gasoline must be stored, etc.

A good starting point is an How Emergency Power Systems Work from HowStuffWorks.com. There are 6+ pages in the series so be sure to read each:

1. Introduction to How Emergency Power Systems Work
2. Emergency Power Options and Goals
3. Understanding Your Power Needs
4. Choosing Between an Inverter and a Generator
5. Hooking the Power into Your House
6. Lots More Information

Some of the things I learned:
- add a gas stabilizer for gas stored more than one month
- know the peak pull of an appliance. A fridge may not pull much juice while idling but when the compressor turns out, power pull will spike. Many sites on efficient energy usage only report the average power used.
- consider alternating appliances. Run the fridge to cool it down, then unplug it and let the well pump increase the water pressure. Both won't work at the same time but you can stagger usage.

Bottom Line

There's an alternative to gas powered generators now, power inverters. Inverters attach to large batteries (like a car battery) and convert the direct current to alternating current for appliances. There are quiet and safe and affordable in small sizes. Sadly not so cheap for 5000 watt sizes and they may only last for a few hours to a day at best.

How to Do Anything

“Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”

An amazing resource to know about is the web site, How to Make Anything.com. The site contains "GigaBytes of data collected from all over the world" with detailed instructions on how to do just about anything. Items include:

UNDERSTANDING CEREAL CROPS I-WHEAT, OATS, BARLEY, AND RYE
How to Dehorn Cattle
Raising Yaks (a Yak is pictured above)
Cheese making
Donkey work made easy
Snail farming
Making Yoghurt
and more like all types of stoves, making bricks, making Ox carts, sanitation, medicine, education, etc.

Bottom Line
Sites like How to Make Anything.com are amazing and fun to read. But they are not much use after a disaster that knocks out electricity. Or if the site is popular and well know, the server may become overloaded by too much traffic under emergency conditions. You need to prepare in advance to make this site useful:
1. Print out topics of interest and create your own survival manual this way
2. Buy some good survival books
3. You could download useful topics to your PC or flash drive and when the internet and power is down use an UPS (backup power supply) to access the topics (warning - the UPS won't last long).
4. For those technically inclined, it's possible for a bicycle to create power to run a laptop (but not enough for a PC) http://science.howstuffworks.com/question658.htm
Here's one product that claims it can charge batteries via bike: http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm