Moily's islanding move to isolate essential services during blackouts

With the experience of the recent grid collapse that caused the biggest blackout in the country, leaving over 600 million people or half of India's population in the dark, newly-appointed power minister Veerappa Moily yesterday announced a scheme "to island essential services".

The move aims to ensure uninterrupted power supply to hospitals, railways including local metro transport and water supply systems in the event of any mishap. Moily further announced that the expert panel appointed by his predecessor, Sushilkumar Shinde, now home minister, to look into the grid collapse would be restructured.

The three-member panel headed by Central Electricity Authority (CEA) chairman AS Bakshi stands expanded to seven people, to include experts from IIT Kanpur and former members of the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission, and a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.
 
Bakshi would remain chairman, and the panel would submit its report by 16 August.

The meeting, yesterday was attended by Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, power ministers and senior energy secretaries from eight northern states and Chandigarh.

The  ''islanding'' proposal was mooted after Moily met  the chief ministers of north-eastern states.

''The state chief ministers have been asked to prepare islanding schemes in three months and implement them in six months,'' Moily told reporters.
 
Under the islanding system, designated parts of the network get de-linked from the rest of the grid in the event of a major power failure.