Vol. 72/No. 7      February 18, 2008

Severe blizzards in China in late January left some of the country’s coal-fired power plants with as little as three days’ worth of coal. Seven percent of China’s power plants had to be temporarily shut down. About 80 percent of China’s electricity is generated with coal, in a country where energy demands have steadily increased along with popular expectations for higher living standards.

“The effects of massive power outages in China could have created as severe an effect as Hurricane Katrina, which took the largest U.S. port off line for three days,” noted a January 31 report by Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), a private U.S. intelligence analysis firm. It said that in previous years, the disruption of coal shipments by snowfalls have caused blackouts and brownouts throughout the country.

Widespread blackouts last month in both Argentina and South Africa shut down industry and left many homes without electricity.

In South Africa, mines—the country’s main employer—shut down for four days at the end of January because Eskom, the government-controlled utility company, could not generate enough power to ventilate and cool the deep underground mining shafts. The utility has resorted to rotating power cuts around neighborhoods. The South African outages also disrupted industry in other nearby countries.

Since 1994, when the African National Congress came to power, South Africa has doubled the percentage of its population connected to the electrical grid to more than 70 percent, the New York Times reported January 31. But the country faces a challenge in building new power plants and bringing them on line fast enough to meet growing electrical needs. Plants commissioned in 2003 and 2004 have yet to be built.  
 
Rising demand in Southeast Asia
A large percentage of the population in the semicolonial world lacks electricity. In India 44 percent of the population, 500 million people, are without electricity, Stratfor reported. Only 39 percent of Indonesia’s population, the fourth largest in the world, has access to electricity. Few African countries have electrification rates above 50 percent.

Power shortages affected Vietnam in early 2007. A similar crisis is imminent in Thailand because of increasing demand and stagnant output. In India, where blackouts are common, especially in summertime, energy needs are expected to double by 2030.

Imperialist investors are looking to make a buck through financing power plants in power-starved semicolonial countries. Morgan Stanley recently estimated that “developing” countries will need to spend nearly $22 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade—the majority in Asia and much of it on power plants.

The British government-owned private equity group CDC Group recently said it plans to spend $1 billion for infrastructure in semicolonial countries, which is targeted to benefit its overseas operations. Its investment in developing electricity in Uganda, for example, will largely benefit the numerous British-owned companies in its former colony.

Many businesses operating in these countries seek “stabilization” agreements from the governments in exchange for building plants and factories. These agreements guarantee imperialist companies “first draw” on water and power, at the expense of the local population.
 
 
Related articles:
Closing the world energy gap  
 
 
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