India, 2012
A girl prepares food by candlelight in Jammu, India, on August 1, 2012. India's massive power failures on July 30 and 31 were unprecedented in size and left 670 million people without electricity across the nation's north and east.
Before power was restored on August 1, about half of all residents of India—nearly 10 percent of the entire world's population—were left in the dark by a cascade of collapsing regional systems. The outage's exact cause may be debatable, but the ultimate source of trouble was predictable: India's power structure is often unable to meet peak power demands. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called for a $400 billion investment to help increase the capacity and reliability of India's power grid, but the country's efforts to build "ultra-mega" coal plants have hit economic snags, while its effort to build the world's largest nuclear power plant faces protests and delays.
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