U.S. losing India in the oil wars

Iran drawing India closer with talks on train, road access to Afghanistan - The Washington Post: "India’s closer cooperation with Iran will likely offend the United States, which has been pushing the international community to punish Iran over its nuclear program.

India has come under increasing pressure from Washington over its ties with Iran, but New Delhi needs Iranian crude supplies to power its economic growth. Iran supplies about 12 percent of India’s energy needs.

India’s talks with Iran will explore ways to expand trade to improve the heavily skewed balance of trade between the two countries, Mathai said.

Two-way trade in the last year totaled about $16 billion, of which Indian oil imports from Iran accounted for $13.5 billion.

Mathai said India would accept sanctions imposed by the United Nations, but would not heed those imposed by others, referring to harsher sanctions maintained by the United States and Europe."

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Massive highway project was a huge mistake

The Demise Of The Car  |  Peak Oil News and Message Boards: "Alas, the irony is rich. India conceived of this highway project as oil prices hit deep lows at the end of the past millennium. Now that the highway network is constructed and oil prices have more than quadrupled, it is massive investment in the powergrid that hundreds of millions of Indians so desperately need instead—not road building."

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Climate Change, Fossil Fuel dependence -- India is hitting the wall

How An Unholy Alliance of Unusual Weather and Scarce Coal Nuked India’s Power Grid | Smart News: "Indeed, the New York Times points to a dearth in imported coal as one of the possible causes for triggering the massive blackout. Another potential force that is driving energy demand and limiting supply is this year’s monsoon, the annual rainy season that supplies three-quarter’s of the country’s water. Or, rather, that this year’s monsoon never happened. The lack of monsoon rains, says Reuters, has caused energy demand to climb as farmers in northwestern India’s heavily producing  agricultural regions leaned more heavily on irrigation to water their fields. Businessweek adds,

The less-than-normal rainfall has put strains on India’s hydroelectric power supply, which accounts for 19 percent of the country’s 205 gigawatt generation capacity but has dropped nearly 20 percent in the first six months of the financial year because of the delayed monsoon rains."

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India power blackout leaves 670 million without electricity | News | National Post

AP Photo

India power blackout leaves 670 million without electricity | News | National Post: "Roads are gridlocked, coal miners are trapped underground, hospitals have been plunged into darkness and millions of  train travellers are stranded after grids supplying electricity to half of India’s 1.2 billion people collapsed on Tuesday in the second major blackout in as many days.

Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, the outage was the worst to hit India in more than a decade and embarrassed the government, which has failed to build up enough power capacity to meet soaring demand.

“Even before we could figure out the reason for yesterday’s failure, we had more grid failures today,” said R. N. Nayak, chairman of the state-run Power Grid Corporation."

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