China power outages pose new threat to supplies of chips and other goods

Government efforts to curb energy consumption to reduce carbon emissions, along with surging coal prices has led to power outages across China’s manufacturing hubs. This poses a threat to further disrupt strained global supply chains for semiconductors and other vital goods. China’s powerful economic-planning agency has set a target to cut energy intensity per unit of GDP by about 3% from last year, as part of a bid by Beijing to reach peak emissions before 2030. This means that electricity use has to grow at a lower rate than GDP. In the first half of 2021, however, electricity use rose 16.2%, while GDP increased 12.7%, with GDP expected to slow further in the second half of the year.

Re-disseminated by Wealth and Society from The Wall Street Journal