The Japanese government yesterday called on Tokyo residents to continue conserving electricity by switching off their lights as forecasts of further scorching heat threaten to put more pressure on the grid.
Offices across the city are going dark to help conserve energy.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government turned off the lights in some offices yesterday afternoon, the Mainichi newspaper reported.
Photo: Reuters
The municipal government also stopped one of its elevators in an effort to curb power usage, the report said.
Japan’s temperatures for the last 10 days of this month are expected to be the hottest for the period in at least 100 years, public broadcaster NHK reported.
High temperatures would continue to strain power supplies as the week progresses, with Japan’s government extending an advisory into today that calls for households and businesses to curb consumption in Tokyo.
The city’s power reserve ratio is today expected to drop below a minimum threshold for grid stability, data from the network coordinator showed.
Japan’s power crunch this week comes amid expectations of a long summer of pressure on electricity networks across much of Asia, with blistering heat seen raising demand just as global fuel shortages limit supply.
While hotter weather later this week is expected to stretch Tokyo’s grid, the capital is unlikely to face blackouts as generation in the rest of the country is strong.
Tokyo’s spot power prices for this afternoon climbed to ¥200 per kilowatt hour, the highest intraday level since January last year, Japan Electric Power Exchange data showed.
Top Japan steelmakers, including Nippon Steel Corp and JFE Holdings Inc, said they would boost power output from their own generation facilities to help add more supply to the Tokyo region.
Japan recently introduced a new system to warn people to prepare for potential power crunches. Under the new methodology, the government issues a supply advisory a day before if electricity reserve ratios are expected to drop below 5 percent and ramps it up to an alert if that figure is seen slipping under 3 percent, the minimum level necessary for a stable grid.
The power reserve ratio for Tokyo is forecast to stay below 3 percent for much of this afternoon.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)