How China’s power crunch creates chaos, uncertainty in hardest-hit northeast rust belt
- Residents are pleading for more to be done as businesses shut down and authorities vow to address the problem
- After poor planning by local governments and grid operators, a severe shortage of coal continues to fuel questions about when rolling blackouts will end
A decision by the regional grid operator to suddenly cut off his power late last month sent a Dandong fishmonger into a panic, mulling whether he would have to give away his seafood before it went bad.
The outage was relatively brief for Mr Wang – a few hours – but for a business owner whose livelihood depends on freezers, power outages can have an immediate and dangerous impact.
“I had to sell all my seafood at much lower prices on the next day,” Mr Wang lamented from his coastal hometown in the northeastern province of Liaoning.
The power situation was even worse for his uncle, a farmer living in a village on the outskirts of Dandong. On two separate days during the weeklong National Day holiday earlier this month, electricity was cut off in the village from 6am to 10pm.
While more than half of China’s provincial jurisdictions have imposed strict power-rationing measures to address a critical energy shortage that has swept the nation, the crisis in the nation’s northeast has been more debilitating. Other parts of the country have mostly adopted planned electricity cuts, with advance notice given to industrial users.
