Every evening before Indian executive Sushmita Rao leaves her Delhi office, she phones her maid to switch on the air conditioner so her apartment is refreshingly cool when she reaches home.
“I work in an air-conditioned office and I suffocate if my place isn’t cool,” said Rao, one of hundreds of millions of Indians who went without electricity last week in the world’s worst-ever blackout.
The monster grid failure was blamed on greedy states consuming more than their allotted power quotas as they sought to meet spikes in demand.
Photo: AFP
Part of the demand surge comes from Indians’ adopting electricity-guzzling lifestyles, which adds to the strain on the grid from industrial users and businesses in Asia’s third-largest economy.
“As India’s middle class broadens, there’s a heavier burden on energy demand as people buy appliances for a better quality of life,” sain Will Pearson, global energy analyst at London-based Eurasia Group.
Experts warn that blackouts like those that knocked out power to one half of India’s 1.2 billion population on Monday and Tuesday last week could be the way of the future unless the government fixes the creaking electricity sector.
“We’re growing through a major societal transformation ... we will need more and more power to fuel our industries, consumer goods, our malls, our offices,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of leading retail consultancy Technopak. “Unless planners recognize this, we’re going to see many more failures on the scale of the ones we saw.”
There are 470 million people in what global consultancy PwC calls the “emerging middle class” — those sandwiched between the lowest income group and the middle class.
Though they earn modest sums, collectively, they have large purchasing power, PwC says.
The middle class numbers 160 million according to India’s National Council for Applied Economic Research — bigger than the populations of Russia or Japan — and is seen rising to 267 million by 2016.
Air conditioners, microwave ovens, toasters and washing machines are possessions that distinguish India’s upwardly mobile and have become increasingly available and affordable since pro-market reforms of the 1990s.
Consumer attitudes in India to air conditioners have “witnessed a paradigm shift” in recent years from luxury product to domestic necessity, consultancy TechSci noted, forecasting the AC market will expand annually by 14 percent for the next five years.
Indian summers see the mercury rise above 50°C in many areas, and these are followed by the sticky, humid monsoon season.
Ad manager Rao is one of an increasing number of Indians who work in air-conditioned offices, shop in air-conditioned malls and dine in air-conditioned restaurants.
Rao, who lives alone, says she has a washing machine two TVs, air conditioners in every room, an entertainment system, laptop, hairdryer and a host of other electronic devices.
“I use a lot of electricity, but it’s my lifestyle — I like to be comfortable,” she says.
Experts say last week’s blackouts served to focus minds on how India will meet the fast-growing needs of its citizens, industry and businesses.
The power failure was “a wake-up call,” Technopak’s Singhal said.
“This country already has 900 million mobile phones — it sounds like a small thing — but these all need to be charged every day.”
Power cuts are a daily occurrence in India, which runs a peak-hour electricity shortfall of around 12 percent — despite the fact that about a third of Indians have no connection to the grid.
As of 2009, just 66.3 percent of Indians had access to electricity, compared with 98.3 percent for Brazil and 99.4 percent for China, according to the latest World Development Indicators.
“It is imperative our basic infrastructure requirements are in keeping with India’s aspirations,” said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”