Power-less: More transmission towers collapse as winds turn ferocious

Here is more proof of climate change’s enormous economic cost. Altered wind patterns across the Indian
sub-continent, which the scientific community, too, hasn’t sufficiently forewarned of, is wreaking havoc on the country’s power transmission sector, with the towers collapsing at a much faster rate in recent years.

While over 90% of tower collapses are believed to be due to high-speed wind, as many as 473 towers failed between 2012 and 2016, compared with 142 in the previous five-year period. Replying to a question raised in Parliament, power minister RK Singh recently said as many as 52 electricity transmission towers collapsed between October 2016 and March 2018 and high-velocity wind was behind the failure of 39 of these towers, which came apart within five years of commissioning.