China’s southwestern Sichuan state has extended the factory shutdowns to Thursday due to an one-month-long heatwave and drought, marking the latest huge global supply string disruption to emanate from the crisis-hit nation.
Foreign manufacturers including Apple and Toyota and also Chinese solar power item cell makers had originally planned in order to resume production upon Sunday after their six-day shutdowns ended on Saturday. Nevertheless , the provincial federal government on Sunday released a Level 1 emergency response due to the extreme weather conditions and ordered factories to stop work.
About 16, five hundred companies in Sichuan have reportedly been affected by power shortage right after reservoirs’ water levels dropped and halved the province’s hydropower output.
Some Chinese media mentioned the problem could lead to more stock shutdowns in far eastern coastal cities along with massive industrial capacity, though academics believed that last September’s nationwide power crisis would not repeat this year.
Over the past two decades, China has been developing hydropower, wind plus solar power plants in the western region and transmitting cheap electricity to industrial cities in the eastern area.
As Sichuan is located on the upstream of the Yangtze Lake and has about one, 400 streams, this built a large number of hydropower plants to supply 80% of its power intake while selling the surplus electricity output to neighboring provinces.
While many parts of the world were suffering from heatwaves and dry weather conditions in July, Sichuan saw the water degrees of its reservoirs head to 40% in This summer and 50% within August from a calendar year ago. The State Main grid Sichuan Electric Power Business said its strength output had recently been halved due to the hot weather and drought.
The National Meteorological Center of the China and taiwan Meteorological Administration (CMA) said last week it had issued high-temperature red warning signals, which refers to a scenario where at least 4 provinces recorded more than 40°C in the past forty eight hours, for twenty-eight consecutive days between July 20 and August 17.
This said the number of days with high temperature amounted to 12 times on average across different places in the country in between June 1 and August, the highest considering that such records had been kept beginning in 1961. Normally, the figure should be about seven days, the CMA mentioned.
On August 14, the Sichuan authorities ordered the shutdown of all factories and stopped air-conditioning within shopping malls and general public facilities between August 15 and twenty to give local occupants a higher priority in receiving electricity. On Sunday, it extended the shutdown time period to August twenty five.
Last week, affected industrial facilities included Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, the maker of the iPad and Apple View, and BOE Technology Group Co Limited, a supplier of LCD and OLED flat panels regarding Apple, media reviews said. Japanese auto maker Toyota said if it could not resume the production that the sales in mainland China would be crippled.
The shutdown of solar power product makers in Sichuan which includes Tongwei, Contemporary Amperex Technology, JinkoSolar plus GCL New Keeping might disrupt the global supply chain, Yuan Silai, an IT columnist, wrote in an post last Saturday. It was tough for Sichuan in order to diversify to sun and wind power or rely on fossil fuel power generation within the short run, Yuan mentioned.
Li Junfeng, an professional member of the authorities of China Energy Research Society, told Yicai. possuindo that it was abnormal that the water levels of the Yangtze River dropped significantly in late July plus early August since the dry season ought to be between November and April. Li said it had been the earliest dry season since records were kept from 1951.
Li said as the energy grid was designed and built to transfer Sichuan’s excess power to some other provinces, it was hard for other regions to transmit electrical power back to Sichuan.
He said any time a place relied heavily on wind, sun and hydroelectric energy, its power result would easily be affected by the weather. He said it was necessary for Sichuan to build more power storage space facilities to stabilize its energy supply.
The weather situation had been at another intense when Sichuan province and the nearby Chongqing municipal city were hit by huge flooding of the Yangtze River in the summer of 2020. The catastrophe damaged many residential and agricultural locations downstream and triggered the 2. 4-kilometer 3 Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze Lake in Hubei state to become slightly deformed.
Li Guoying, Minister of Water Resources, mentioned last Saturday that drought in the southwest region and countrywide hot weather would keep on in the following 7 days. Li said the federal government had set up an anti-drought task power to ensure water provide in cities across the Yangtze River.
He said at the same time the southwest region, or the upstream of the Yellow River, would see water damage due to some unusual heavy rainfalls.
Media reports stated some districts within Shanghai, Zhejiang plus Jiangsu provinces had ordered their factories to partially postpone productions to save energy during the past week. It had been unclear if the purchase would be extended.
Jin Xiandong, a spokesperson of National Development and Reform Commission, said upon August 16 the decline in hydropower output would produce extra demand upon coal-fired power era.
Currently, The far east produces 60% from the electricity by burning coal. In This summer, the country’s complete electricity output rose 4. 5% from a year ago while coal-fired electricity output increased 5. 3%.
Final September, China suffered from a nationwide power crunch as energy plants lost the market incentive to maintain result amid a drastic embrace coal prices as well as the nation’s electricity price cap. The central government spent a few months stabilizing the situation simply by boosting coal supplies in Shanxi plus Inner Mongolia and raising price caps.
Wu Jiang, an assistant teacher at Renmin College and a former member of the State Electricity Regulating Commission, said the government should carefully monitor the power shortage problem in Sichuan and prevent coal suppliers from raising prices irregularly.
Wu said hopefully last September’s energy crunch would not repeat this year.
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