City grid pushed to breaking point

• Source: Global Times
• [08:08 August 03 2010]
• Comments

By Liu Dong

Residents are being urged to use their air-conditioning units and electric fans sparingly as the heat wave continues to increase the risk of power outages around the city, after the municipal grid overloaded Monday and caused blackouts for hundreds of residential households.

Some 700 residents in Jing'an district were without power for most of the day Monday, while more than 200 residents in Xuhui district in two separate locations met the same fate from Sunday evening until Monday morning.

"I was having a shower when the power went out," a resident in Xuhui district, who preferred to remain anonymous, told local media Monday. "I became so sweaty during the power outage because I couldn't turn on my air-conditioning that I had to have another shower when the power finally came back on."

But the city operator Shanghai Municipal Electric Power Company (SMEPC) said Monday that their hands are tied so long as the extreme heat remains and residents continue to put a strain on the electrical circuit, which broke a new record for handling some 25.72 million kilowatts of power Monday.

"The circuit is under heavy pressure right now with every household pushing the system to the limit as air-conditioning and electric fans exhaust grid capacities," Wang Changxing, a press officer of SMEPC, told the Global Times Monday. "We are asking residents to mind the situation and be more conservative with their energy consumption over the next few days as the temperatures forecast are expected to hover in the high 30-something range."

Wang said that residents living in older homes, which circuits are limited in their capacity to handle excessive demand, and certain neighborhoods in Pudong New Area as well as Yangpu, Baoshan, Songjiang and Minhang districts, which rely on less advanced grids, should brace themselves for the possibility of a power outage in the coming days.

But he added that the company is doing everything it can to prevent any more outages from occurring around the city, and said that repair workers have been working round the clock to respond to affected households as soon as possible.

"We still need residents to be patient as our resources are limited," he said. "We aim to have a repair team sent to households within the outer ring area within 40 minutes, while those outside the outer ring may need to wait for about an hour, but when too many requests come in we can't always guarantee this."

According to SMEPC statistics, the company manages a daily average of 20,000 complaints. That figure soared to more than 33,000 on Sunday evening, while only some 4,000 of those requests had been responded to as of Monday.

Wang said that part of the problem lies with impatient residents.

"Many residents call us again and again even after we've already dispatched someone out to have a look," he said. "Sometimes they even call us when they shouldn't.

"For example, if a minor fuse blows, residents or the property managers should handle this matter on their own rather than distract us," he added.

Wang said that while hundreds of households have been inconvenienced by power outages over the past couple of days, the number was not unreasonable considering that the company serves some 8 million households in the city.

The power outages come after the city has endured 10-plus high temperature days this year. Weather authorities predict up to some dozen more high temperature days this summer, nine more of such days compared to previous years, according to the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau.