Power Shortages In China Looming...

Power demand has reached utility's limits to produce as reported in the The Standard today.

Many cities across China face power shortfalls as booming industries compete with rising electricity consumption by millions of air-conditioners. A shortage of coal used to fuel power plants has added to the problem.

Someone said to me this past weekend that the 3 Rivers Gorge dam project will alleviate some of the power shortages in China. But this has to be put into perspective. The massive 3 Rivers Gorge power project will produce 18,000 megawatts of power but this is just a drop in the bucket relative to the installed capacity of 450,000 megawatts that China now has.

The stridently anti-American Asia Times Online has an interesting article on power generation in China, here. They assert that China is planning plenty of new power plants and that capacity should be sufficient by the end of this decade. But with large shortfalls in coal production that I wrote about before, I doubt that all the power shortage problems will have been solved.