Energy Shortages

Energy shortage forces Central Asians to burn dung

With no heating and just three hours of electricity a day, Malokhat Atayeva is struggling to survive the coldest winter in three decades in her small town in western Tajikistan.

"It's so cold that water turns into ice in the kettle overnight," Atayeva, a mother of two, said by telephone from Tursunzade, as temperatures outside, normally above subzero, plunged to -20 degrees Celsius.

"We sleep fully clothed, wrapped in blankets. Children stopped going to school because it's too cold in the classroom."

Like Atayeva, millions of people across energy-rich Central Asia are scrambling to find refuge from one of the harshest winters in living memory.

Extreme cold is no surprise to the 60 million people scattered across a region wedged between Russia, China and Iran, but this year's winter has exposed the poor state of crumbling Soviet-era utilities and pipelines and sparked energy shortages.

Lying on some of the world's biggest energy reserves, Central Asia has attracted billions of dollars of foreign investment as the European Union and other powers seek energy deals in the region. But the cold snap caught impoverished Tajikistan off guard, forcing the government to resort to daily rations of electricity and gas. Central heating has all but stopped working across Tajikistan, its utilities ruined by a 1990s civil war.

Governments across Central Asia have pledged to carry out urgent repairs and build new electricity generators. But there were no signs of relief as the severe weather has entered a second month.

In a snow-covered China, entire regions are without electricity and gas

China is facing its worst energy shortage in many years, with heightened demand caused by the intense cold and the snow, and insufficient coal supplies unable to keep up. After an energy shortage that has struck at least 13 provinces and reached about 70 gigawatts, approximately equal to the entire capacity of Great Britain, the government has ordered that coal be supplied first of all to the power plants.

The imposition of price controls on coal and the closing of thousands of mines not in compliance with safety regulations have affected coal supplies. The heavy snowfall of recent days has blocked the roads, cut off supply routes, and downed power lines. In seven counties, the power circuits have been completely shut down, leaving 129,000 families without power, while bad weather is hampering repair efforts. In Hubei and Anhui alone, the provinces hardest hit by the snow, the energy shortage has affected 10 million people, and more than a million hectares of crops have been destroyed, at an estimated loss of 1.83 billion yuan. In Wuhan, the capital of Hubei located on the frozen Yangtze river, there have been intermittent blackouts all week, the worst since 1997. Coal fuels 78% of the country's power plants, and produced about 83% of the energy used in 2007.

According to experts, the current coal shortage is due above all to the imposition of price controls, as the sellers watch the price of coal rise rapidly in the world and wait for the government to permit higher prices in the next few months.

In many of the provinces, like Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hubei, drought has aggravated the situation by reducing the production of hydroelectric power.

China in power shortage warning

Thirteen regions have already started to ration power supplies, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

It said coal reserves were down to emergency levels and stockpiles were only high enough to generate power for the whole country for eight days.

China's economic boom has led to surging demand for electricity...

Dark days for African mining

Namibia has become the latest southern African country to freeze all major investment projects due to an energy crisis that threatens to overshadow the region’s growing FDI prospects.

The mining industry will be among the sectors worst hit, with Namibia’s state electricity utility NamPower placing a moratorium on all new mines, saying they would have to wait until at least 2009 to get power.

NamPower has also been forced to resort to load shedding and time-of-use tariffs for electricity usage at peak times as it grapples with the energy shortage across the southern African region.

Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe this week reported power outages caused by aging infrastructure and growing demand.
The situation has been exacerbated by South African energy utility Eskom’s announcement that it would be forced to stop exporting electricity to neighbouring countries as South Africa’s own energy crisis deepened.

Eskom has also asked the government to shelve any new big industrial projects at least until 2013, when the current electricity shortage should have eased.

The utility wants both foreign and local projects requiring 1,000MW or more to be held back, but said projects already under way would go ahead.

This decision has put potential mining expansions at risk, with South Africa’s ferrochrome and platinum industry already worst hit by the blackouts.

Now NamPower’s decision threatens to further hurt mining investments in the region.

The desert country has earmarked its burgeoning uranium mining industry as a key economic growth area with the recent discovery of a major uranium resource, which could end up being one of the world’s biggest uranium deposits.
In the meantime, power outages in Zimbabwe and Zambia have also hit the mining industry.

Outages caused by a major electrical fault on the power line linking the two countries, which engineers from both sides were trying to repair, resulted in 369 miners being trapped at Zambia’s Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) and Konkola Copper Mines (KCM).

The power outages also caused partial flooding at Chililabombwe copper mine, a unit of KCM, as water could not be pumped out.

KCM has since suspended mining operations in Zambia.