China has ordered emergency ship-ments of coal by road and waterways to help ease severe energy shortages said to be the worst in two decades, state media reported yesterday.
Coal will be transported by expressways from major mining areas to the coast and then shipped to eastern and southern areas worst hit by shortages, said reports in the Shanghai Daily and other state-run newspapers.
The Communications Ministry, which oversees transport, has requisitioned cargo ships from international shipping lines to help boost coal shipments, and major Chinese ports have beefed up their coal facilities to help meet demand, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
PHOTO: AFP
China is facing its worst sum-mer power shortage since the early 1980s, with the shortfall of electricity forecast to hit 30 million
kilowatts.
Major cities like Shanghai have darkened decorative lighting and ordered factories to cut back or switch hours of production. Man-agers of shopping malls, hotels and office buildings have been told to reduce air conditioning during the hottest hours of the day.
With industrial output soaring amid 9 percent-plus economic growth, supplies of coal and electricity have failed to keep up with surging needs.
Demand for electricity rose 16 percent in the first six months of this year over the same period last year, Xinhua reported, citing government statistics.
It said cities across the country imposed 757,000 power brownouts during that time.
Though they are year-round, power shortages are most acute during China's brutally hot summers, when air conditioning gobbles up about half of all electricity consumed by major cities.
In cities along the Yangtze River, including Shanghai, summer high temperatures tend to hover between 30?C to 38?C, often for weeks on end. Now that most residents can afford to install air conditioners, the government is asking manufacturers to develop energy-saving models to help reduce consumption.
Meanwhile, transfers of electricity from the resource-rich western parts of the country to the industrialized east have been stepped up, Xinhua said.
West-to-east power transfers rose 56 percent in the first half of the year from a year earlier, to 14.2 billion kilowatt hours, it said, citing data from the China Southern Power Grid. Most of the transfers went to Guangdong, which is a key export manufacturing region.
China plans to more than double its electricity output by 2020. The government, grappling with severe air pollution problems, is looking to shift some of that away from coal-burning plants and to nuclear power, wind power and tidal energy.
Earlier this week, the government announced it has approved a new nuclear power plant at Sanmen, Zhejiang Province.
The plant will have a combined installed capacity of 12 million kilowatts when it begins operation in 2010, Xinhua reported.
China has plans to build as many as 32 large 1,000-megawatt nuclear power reactors over the next 16 years.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat
RSS