Hidden costs of power cuts and battery backups

Many developing countries suffer from intense electricity deficits. For instance, the Indian electricity sector, despite having the world's fifth largest installed capacity, suffers from severe energy and peak power shortages. In February 2013, these shortages were 8.4% (7.5 GWh) and 7.9% (12.3 GW) respectively. To manage these deficits, many Indian electricity suppliers induce several hours of power cuts per day that impact a large number of their customers. Many customers use lead-acid battery backups with inverters and/or diesel generators to power their essential loads during those power cuts. The battery backups exacerbate the deficits by wasting energy in losses (conversion and storage) and by increasing the load (by immediately charging the batteries) when the grid is available. The customers also end up incurring additional costs due to aforementioned losses and due to limited lifetimes of batteries and inverters. In this paper, we discuss the issues with power cuts and backups in detail and illustrate their impact through measurements and simulation results.

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