China electricity shortage: industrial production grinds to halt and traffic lights fail amid rationing
- Half of China’s provincial jurisdictions mandate rationing of electricity, but poor communication and unclear timeline leave angry public in the dark
- One local government warns that entire power grid at risk of collapse if electricity is not rationed
China is in the midst of a power supply crisis that has turned critical in recent days – threatening entire power grids and prompting analysts to slash economic growth forecasts for the year.
In the past month, 16 out of 31 provincial jurisdictions – from industrial powerhouses in the south such as Guangdong to the rust belt in the northeast – have rolled out electricity-rationing measures, triggering widespread alarm among much of the population and plunging the nation’s industrial sector into chaos.
“The situation worsened over the past weekend,” Lu Ting, chief economist at Nomura, wrote in a note on Monday, adding that the widespread outages are not limited to factories.
While China is used to seeing power supply cuts in parts of the country each year, their frequency has increased sharply since the second half of last year.
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Power crisis in China leaves highway in the dark