In a somewhat confused report Sept. 23, Bloomberg News said that power shortages were appearing in various industrial areas of China, and had caused the government in Beijing to order “power curbs” in nine provinces, in various industries such as aluminum, textile and chemical fiber production. It also reported that “emergency power cuts” were “ordered across 14 cities in the northern province of Liaoning after the grid suffered supply shortfalls [i.e., brownouts or blackouts], according to a notice on the local grid operator’s social media late Thursday. `Power suppliers will spare no effort to keep providing electricity to residents, hospitals, schools, radio, TV, telecommunications, transportation hubs and other important users,’ the notice said.” And Bloomberg added notes about withdrawal of power discounts which had been in effect for aluminum production in Yunnan, and electricity-intensive manufacturing companies in Zhejiang Province in order to halt production entirely for the last 10 days of September.
The same article reports, however, that these cuts and power shortages follow a period of months of sharply rising CO2 emissions – a strange way of saying that industrial production has been rising strongly and electricity generation, dominated by coal-fired plants, has not been able to keep pace, resulting in ordered shutdowns. Underlying both slices of the situation seems to be a very sharp rise in the price of coal, for which China is the world’s main buyer, which in turn imposing large losses on power producers and causing them to file for large rate increases. The coal price increases are perhaps comparable (65% higher than one year ago, according to South China Morning Post) to the spiking prices of natural gas in Europe.
In both cases the cause is hyperinflationary pressures in the policies of trans-Atlantic central banks and large private banks, combined with intense pressure from City of London and Wall Street against investment in coal, oil or fossil fuel-fired electric power.
This situation may have been a factor in the decision by President Xi Jinping to make a pledge, in his UN speech last week, to inaugurate no further coal-fired power projects in nations participating in the Belt and Road Initiative.
