Rationing the electricity usage

Come summer, the "load" (demand) on the electricity usage in the city of Mumbai increases greatly. Over the years (due to the increasing urban population and maybe due to the lack of setting up of newer power generation plants), the demand outstripped supply completely. Multiple areas (mostly suburbs and Thane district) have to bear the brunt of the "load shedding". In some places, there is no power supply for more than 8 hours.

While Mumbai was largely unaffected, it might not get spared this year. As mentioned in this article, the MERC is deciding to "ration" the electricity usage. Anyone who uses more than 300 units in a month has to pay a heavy fine. Now that makes a bit of sense...in the short term, its a very good solution. Unless, people realise the situation, they are going to "use" electricity like anything. The BEST that supplies electicity to the southern parts of the city plans to implement the above scheme. It is fairly obvious that its meant to curb the usage of air-conditoners. In some homes as mentioned in this article, there are upto 3 air-conditoners installed. An air-condtioner is known to consume in 40 minutes as much power as a ceiling fan can in 24 hours.

It remains to be seen whether the fine will actually be implemented and if it is, then how effective it would be. Mumbai has got a fairly large population of people who can pay any amount (fine or no fine) for whatever they want. But, it might make some upper middle-class people sit up and take notice and work out ways to "save" electricity.

I feel this is a good short-term measure. Also, it should give a boost for research into alternative sources of energy. For example, hand wound mobile phone chargers as well as solar-powered phone chargers have made an appearance in foreign markets. However, they are a bit expensive and the hand-wound ones need a lot of winding to be useful on a daily basis. Maybe if we could reduce the cost and improve the performance of these, it would help save some electricity.

This article claims that a certain 7-storeyed "bungalow" in Juhu has been running on hybrid power (solar and wind) to reduce its dependency on the electric supply. Interestingly, the article mentions that this was the only bungalow that had power during the 26th July deluge.

Time for the appropriate engineers and scientists to start thinking and developing these things at an affordable price so that its usage becomes more common place. Instead of spending time worrying about some stupid payroll application, maybe they could concentrate in their own fields for a while and help India out of a difficult crisis.