China’s power crisis in Sichuan sparks widespread rationing amid ‘crazy hot’ conditions
- Homes, malls and offices go dark in Sichuan’s Dazhou city after provincial government says ‘leave power for the people’
- Sichuan was mostly spared from nationwide power cuts in 2021 that resulted from a lack of coal, but droughts are now crippling the hydroelectric power supply that the province depends on
With severe drought conditions showing no sign of abating, power rationing is spreading beyond the regional industrial sector in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, curtailing residential power use and threatening energy supplies elsewhere in the country.
Dazhou, a city of 5.4 million people in northeast Sichuan, announced rolling blackouts in its urban areas on Wednesday, affecting power to homes, offices and malls.
The planned electricity cuts will last for three hours at most for each power section in the jurisdiction, but they might be extended if the supply gap is too big, according to the latest notice by the state-owned Dazhou Electric Power Group.
In an earlier notice on Tuesday, the company had said residential power cuts would be implemented only if “all measures are still unable to alleviate the pressure of power supply”.
“Since August 7, due to multiple factors such as the extreme high temperatures and tight power supplies in the whole province, there has been a large power-supply gap in the local power grid of the main urban area of Dazhou,” the Tuesday notice said. “The company has taken various measures such as ordering industrial users to stop production or to ration power, to alleviate the imbalance between power supply and demand.
