China's Power Shortfall Begin to Ripple Around the World

Link:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-power-shortfalls-begin-to-ripple-around-the-world-11633101100

CItation: Stella Yifan Xie, Sha Hua and Chuin-Wei Yap. "China’S Power Shortfalls Begin To Ripple Around The World". WSJ, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-power-shortfalls-begin-to-ripple-around-the-world-11633101100. Accessed 2 Oct 2021.

In recent weeks, China was been struggling with widespread power shortages, hindering the recovery of the economy while also risking global supply chain disruption and heightened inflationary pressure across the globe. It is not the first power shortage experience from China, but it is the largest ever witnessed and will continue to experience until some effective measures can be taken, especially before the winter months when energy consumption increases. 

Many plants and factories have been forced to shut down, work shorter hours, and have fewer days. Not only this but Quzhou City in Eastern China must now adhere to a power-usage cap, which decreases the factory capacity by about one-third. 

Due to the escalated demand for energy at the end of April 2020, China had to increase production at meticulous lengths in order to meet West demand. Because of such industrialization within China and thus the shortages, many other sectors have been heavily affected such as the surge in coal prices due to the increasing demand for power which has thus also halted the output of these stations in order to reduce losses because of the caps on selling prices. 

Nations such as the U.S. and the U.K. have been fueled with anxiety as to whether or not they can rely on China to power their economies throughout the winter months. Furthermore, they have stepped in to look at other options for power that don't include China or use other resources that aren't as difficult to maintain, such as reopening a fertilizer plant that was originally shut down because of rising energy costs but supplied a significant share of the country's carbon dioxide which is a byproduct in food processing. 

While looking for more resources that could make up for the power shortage, the prices of raw materials and essentials are increasing. Affects like this will be noticeable in supply such as textiles, toys, even with machine parts, and overall can further escalate global inflation. Car manufacturers have been one of the hardest hit due to the chip shortage, which has hindered the production of cars. Customers have been waiting for new 2021, and 2022 models for months when the expected and hopeful wait time would be about 8 weeks. At the dealership I work at, Fair Oaks Ford, we have customers who have waited for their 2021 broncos for over 5 months and still haven't received an official date as to when their car will arrive. It's been incredibly frustrating to customers and furthermore our salesmen because people want new cars but many dealerships like us don't have the inventory and have to wait on factory orders. It's even pushed the car market to buy people's cars and sell those used cars at higher rates. Oftentimes, they will even sell vehicles a couple thousand dollars above MSRP because they have to be making up for their losses. 

China's leader called a closed-door meeting and stated "increase coal supplies by all means," and since then have breached record levels topping over $615 a metric ton which is up over 158% from the start of the year. However, this totally goes against the efforts China has been trying to make by reducing its iron and stelling making capacities and shutting down coal mines. By producing and focusing more on coal as our source of energy, the high level of carbon will lead to higher amounts of greenhouse gasses being emitted into the atmosphere which only harms our planet. Hydropower has proven to be difficult with Southwest China experiencing droughts year-long and in the Northeast, have been experiencing extremely low winds which reduces output along with wind farms. 

With difficult times, it's important to look at other options such as geothermal energy which is not incredibly popular in China since they are 18th in the world on the production scale or even focus on harnessing tidal energy which has been evident in China since the 1950's. With such a Nation like China, it's important to be efficient and use those effective and environment-friendly energy sources that can help our world, and even in doing so, can lead to the innovation of new technology that could further globalize our world and create greener trends that can reduce the effects of climate change.