After a major power failure in the country, an islanding scheme was introduced in 1981 to insulate the financial capital from blackouts by severing it from the grid to service a limited area during any external grid disturbances. The islanding system has helped prevent 27 blackouts in the city so far.
However, in October 2020, a power failure exposed the chinks in the system as Mumbai grounded to a halt for a few hours. A Central Electricity Authority (CEA) team that investigated the outage pointed to the inadequacy of the transmission network in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) for the future and highlighted the need to increase embedded generation as against importing power from the grid.
