Water Wars. Count On It.

More disturbing news from today's EEI newsletter:

India Faces Mounting Power Crisis as Drought Affects Fuel Supply

After New Delhi was affected by blackouts last week, Indian officials are considering ways to boost power supply, the Financial Times of London reported. The Indian government said in a Supreme Court filing that electricity "could not be increased to keep pace with the demand due to various constraints such as environmental considerations and non-availability of coal, gas" and hydro power.

Lack of fuel and water have forced plants to cut back or shut down. Delhi Transco Director of Operations S.R. Sethi was quoted by the FT as saying: "If gas terminals were not shut down, we would have been quite comfortable." The newspaper did not detail the terminals' situations, but it did say that drought has severely reduced water available for hydro power.

P Ramesh, a managing director at infrastructure consultant firm Feedback Ventures, was quoted as saying: "The future is going to be even more bleak. India is not adding adequate capacity to keep pace with demand growth."

New power plants supplying the area are not due to come online until 2010. However, Ramesh said, "electricity shortfall will worsen by 10,000 MW every five years based on present capacity additions." The government told the Supreme Court that due to "overall gas shortage in the country, even the existing gas-based stations within the country are generating only 60 percent of the installed capacity."
Financial Times, Aug. 21.


Drought, which is likely to increase as global climate change proceeds apace, will only make this situation worse.

India and China may be the canaries in the global mine when it comes to observing the effects of global climate change. Both have huge populations and appear to be getting hit pretty hard with water shortages already. Both will need to find a way to feed and water their populations in order to mainatina internal stability. Both have nuclear bombs. I'm just saying.