Posted on 05/20/2008 8:11:40 PM PDT by Fred
Chinese power plants are running out of coal, with less than a three-day supply in some areas, the government said Tuesday, adding to China's logistical headaches following a devastating earthquake.
It is the second time in three months that Chinese power plants have run short of coal, an unintended effect of government-mandated price controls - a throwback to communist central planning - to shield the public from rising global energy costs.
Some 32 power plants have already shut down due to lack of fuel, the State Electricity Regulatory Commission said in a report. It said two were in Sichuan province, where last week's magnitude 7.9 quake damaged the power supply grid.
In February, freak snowstorms caught power plants without adequate coal supplies, causing blackouts and factory shutdowns in a country that relies on coal for 70 percent of its electricity.
Utility companies have let coal stocks dwindle and are buying less fuel after Beijing froze power prices last year, while allowing the market-set costs producers pay to rise.
The SERC gave no indication as to how Beijing might respond to new shortages. An employee who answered the phone in its press office referred questions to the Cabinet's National Development and Reform Commission. The NDRC did not respond to requests for comment.
The government created an agency this year to oversee energy policy, but it has yet to take any action.
Beijing has also frozen retail prices of gasoline and diesel. That helped farmers and the urban poor, but it has spurred sales of gas-guzzling luxury cars and propelled double-digit annual growth in fuel consumption.
Oil refiners say they are suffering heavy losses and some began cutting production last year, causing fuel shortages in parts of China's south.
Industry observers have pointed to especially strong demand for diesel, as some of the stricken areas in China now rely on generators for power.
Analysts use the price of heating oil futures to track the cost of diesel, which is chemically similar. This week, the cost of heating oil for June delivery surged to record highs, helping propel gasoline and possibly even oil futures higher, analysts say.
After rising all month, the price of heating oil rose another 14 cents per gallon to $3.6989 on the day after the quake.
"It's turning into a more defined demand for diesel fuel ahead of the Olympics," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of oil trading advisory firm Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Ill. "They appear to stockpiling."
Power plants in the eastern province of Anhui have less than a three-day supply of coal, while those in Beijing have about a week supply, the electricity agency said. The recommended minimum is 15 days; a seven-day supply is considered dangerously low.
In Sichuan province, where the May 12 quake killed tens of thousands of people, power plants have only a seven-day supply of coal, according to the agency. It said two plants have none.
The quake's effect on coal supply was not addressed in the report, but the NDRC says 200 coal mines in Sichuan were closed for inspection after the disaster.
China's power use is growing at double-digit annual rates, driven by a boom that saw the economy expand by 10.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.
On Tuesday, a U.S. official urged Beijing to join the International Energy Agency - a group of major oil consumers that includes the United States and European governments - and aid its efforts to keep petroleum markets stable in times of crisis.
"I believe it is important for China and other key economies in the world, such as India, to prepare to eventually join the IEA as full members," Daniel S. Sullivan, an assistant U.S. secretary of state, said at a business conference.
China's surging energy demand, and its potential impact on prices, has stirred unease abroad as state companies scour Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere for more.
The 27-nation IEA coordinates the release of petroleum from national stockpiles to stabilize prices if crises threaten to disrupt supplies, Sullivan said. He said that was last done in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
Sullivan, who is the U.S. envoy to the Paris-based IEA, said Beijing was invited to take part in an emergency response exercise next month. He urged the government to accept.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred questions about whether Beijing might join the IEA to the NDRC, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
LOL !!
Gee, that sounds familiar.
Now that all of the suspect Babcock & Wilcox plants have been decommissioned, that is safe to say.
The lake behind the Three Gorges Dam has been filling up and the generators are currently producing over 15,000 MW. Final capacity is supposed to be 22,500 MW. To put this huge capacity into perspective, the dam will be able to power more than 10 times the demand of Al Gore's home.
Just like clockwork...
Just like clockwork...
My late Father was a construction manager and when the first nuclear sub, USS Nautilus, was launched in 1954, Dad said that if the reactor design was successful, it would lead to every small city having their own providing electricity.
I agreed with him being only 7-years old, but as I grew older I fully expected it to come to pass. My Dad passed on it 1971 and the small nuclear plants design based on the ones driving our subs is still dead. As dead as the brain matter of all tree hugging Liberal Democrats!
I’m not in any way anti-nuke, but Three Mile Island was not a minor accident. It was literally minutes from melting out when one very smart operator figured out what had caused it and took action about 10 minutes before it wouldn’t have mattered.
It was a series (tradition you know) design flaw.
>>Sounds exactly like CA during the Davis era power crisis.
The CA power crisis was deliberately manufactured. Ever hear the audio of Enron floor traders calling the CA power plants and asking them to shut down? Arrogant bustards.
I remember being introduced by my neighbor to a closed radioactive facility in 75 . He was a safety engineer at ORNL. Along with his 2 kids and my brother we walked through this place together. It was fascinating. (His advice was stay away from the pool as we walked right next to it.) :^)
Very impressive, the dam that is.
That song was a hit on Reagan and everyone knew it. They lost.
It is not an irrational fear, it is fear based on very real, very deadly radioactive material.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
Tells about the reactor accident and aftermath, not the sanitized version released for US domestic viewing.
The part about ‘radioactive for 48,000’ years caught my attention.
should we have nuke weapons? yes!
Do we need nuke plants in every town? NO.
There is no question that the Chernobyl accident was extremely serious and impacted the area almost irreparably. I have seen Elena's website before and it tells an impressive story, plus she's a gutsy person and does a great job of describing her observations. But the media and anti-nuclear advocates never bother to explain the crucial architectural and safety differences between the RBMK reactors, which were an accident waiting to happen, and western reactors. It's much more effective to lump all nuclear reactors under the Chernobyl label and scare the public that doesn't have enough physics education to know when it is being fooled. And the foolers are often no more knowledgeable than the foolees.
The same problem works in the other direction when people are being sold on technologies that are inherently less effective and efficient than the "establishment" technology, and sometimes entirely unworkable; they don't have a sense of the physics that would make that obvious to them. Unfortunately, many of the "renewable" power technologies are in this category. Again, the foolers often don't know any more than the foolees in these cases.
It's the so-called experts who take advantage of these situations that are the problem and should be exposed. The foolers in the media don't have the wherewithal to understand their deception and expose them. The politicians take the shortcut of playing to the foolees to get easy votes. We have to keep yammering plus find our credible spokespersons to contain the damage of this. But I fear that something close to a collapse of western economies will be needed before the foolees' survival instinct gets invoked to take a balanced approach.
This is why price controls in the US as Hillary and Obama propose would never work.
We would return to the gas lines of the 70s, Carter Nightmare x2.
A throwback? I don't think they've ever got rid of them. Socialists like to use price controls too. Like our Democrats. They swoon with the thought of price controls. To save the women and children of course.
Yes, and we darned-well better keep it away from communist China.
So she can come up with a law banning coal mining in the US?
Sorry, but we both know she lives in "Opposite World"...
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