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US Demand for Electricity Falls Further: What Does it Mean?

December 3, 2017

US Demand for Electricity Falls Further: What Does it Mean?

Layoffs at GE Power, for example.

The weekend started Friday night with layoff news from GE’s power division, in two locations.

First, there was Greenville County, South Carolina, where GE Power is one of the largest employers with 3,400 workers.

“Based on the current challenges in the power industry and a significant decline in orders, GE Power continues to transform our new, combined business to better meet the needs of our customers,” GE’s statement said in flawless corporate speak: “As we have said, we are working to reduce costs and simplify our structure to better align our product solutions, and these steps will include layoffs.”

GE Power has not disclosed the number of workers that are part of this layoff. The facilities make large gas turbines and turbine generator sets used by power plants. The plant also makes wind turbines.

Then there was GE Power’s facility in Schenectady, New York, which announced the layoff of an undisclosed number of employees, blaming “a significant decline in orders.”

GE Power has a problem: Electricity consumption in the US peaked in 2007 and has declined since, despite population growth of about 24 million people over the 10 years and despite economic growth.

The chart below, based on data from the Department of Energy’s EIA, shows annual electricity generation from 2001 through 2016. Note the growth in generation through 2007, the plunge during the Financial Crisis, the recovery, and the uneven decline since:

This trend continues in 2017. On Friday, the EIA released its Electric Power Monthly, with power generation data through September 2017. Over these nine months, electricity generation has fallen by 2.6% compared to the same period a year ago. Part of the year-over-year drop in August and September was due to the damaged electric grid in the areas affected by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did Anyone Do Even a Minimal Check on the Sensationalist Bitcoin Electrical Consumption Story?

November 29, 2017

Did Anyone Do Even a Minimal Check on the Sensationalist Bitcoin Electrical Consumption Story?

Check the context before uncritically accepting sensationalist conclusions.

Let’s start with a primer on how to write a sensationalist story that can be passed off as “journalism:”

1. Locate credible-sounding data that can be de-contextualized, i.e. sensationalized.

2. Present the data as “fact” rather than data that requires verification by disinterested researchers.

3. Exaggerate the data as much as possible and set the tone and context with emotionally laden words: “shocking,” etc.

4. Select a context that sensationalizes the conclusion.

Now let’s take a look at a story that has been swallowed whole, with little to no fact-checking or disinterested inquiry: bitcoin’s electrical consumption, i.e. the electricity consumed by mining/maintaining bitcoin’s blockchain.

One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

Let’s start by stipulating that energy consumption is a consequential matter worthy of serious inquiry. It’s important to measure the energy consumption of all the systems that operate within the current status quo, and compare the consumption levels of these systems.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the story.

Right off the bat, the context we’re offered to grasp the enormity of bitcoin’s mining consumption is the electrical consumption of Nigeria, a nation, we’re breathlessly informed, with 186 million residents. Wow! That’s a crazy amount of electrical consumption, right?

Let’s do some very basic fact-checking before we accept sensationalist conclusions, shall we?

Nigeria consumes about 24 billion kWh annually, while the U.S. consumes 3,913 billion kWh annually.

So Nigeria uses 3/5th of 1% (0.6%) of the electricity the U.S. consumes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Hard Landing Hits Electricity Consumption

March 21, 2016

China Hard Landing Hits Electricity Consumption

Chairman of large power company slips, apparently.

OK, we’ve heard the official story. China is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a consumption-based economy. Consumers are king. They’re going to buy stuff. And that’s going to heat up the economy.

Imports and exports have been plunging for months, but no big deal, Chinese consumers – and there are a lot of them – are going to pull the economy forward. That’s the official story.

So now we stumble on a report on the Facebook page of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The report was helpfully in English. And it was a peculiar venue for a report on China: Facebook is still blocked in China.

So the fact the Communist Party rag published it in English and on a venue that is blocked in China makes it seem like this piece of information is not for the Chinese. Maybe it was slipped in by some underling over the weekend while supervisors weren’t paying attention.

That blurb reported that Qiao Baoping, chairman of state-controlled China Guodian Corp, one of the five largest power producers in China, spoke on Saturday at the China Development Forum about the overcapacity of electricity generation in China.

The China Development Forum is a huge deal. It’s organized by the State Council. Dozens of corporate chieftains from around the globe are there, as is IMF’s Christine Lagarde, and other power brokers. Among them is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alibaba’s Jack Ma. They shared the stage on Saturday, as Digital Trends put it, “to lavish praise upon the business cultures of America and China.” It was that sort of event.

And then Qiao Baoping gave his speech on overcapacity of electricity generation in China. Among the things he said were these nuggets, according to the People’s Daily:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Chilling Thing China’s Electricity Consumption Just Said about the Economy

July 24, 2015

The Chilling Thing China’s Electricity Consumption Just Said about the Economy

China has been building what is by now the largest high-speed rail system in the world. Subway systems are growing faster than anyone can imagine anywhere else. Ridership is soaring. High-rise buildings are sprouting up like mushrooms, to be occupied by businesses and consumers that are splurging on tech products, appliances, and air conditioning. All powered by electricity.

China built over 23 million cars, trucks, and buses last year, far more than any other country, in plants that are massive consumers of electricity. It’s producing building materials, solar panels, trains, ships, plastic trinkets, smartphones, and a million other things for its own use and for the rest of the world. All these activities require a lot of electrical power.

China is booming. GDP for the second quarter, despite rumors of a slowdown, came in at a once again astonishing annual rate of 7.0%, just as planned, once again confounding hard-landing gurus. Nothing is going to slow down China. It’s fueled by monetary propellants, endless credit that never turns bad and never has to be paid off, and a stock market run by fiat. So it would seem that electricity consumption would be soaring in parallel.

But no.

Electricity consumption in the first half of 2015 inched up to 2,662.4 billion kWh across the country. Compared to the same period last year, that was up a tiny 1.3%. The flimsiest growth rate in 30 years.

In 19 provinces, power consumption grew at above the national average of 1.3% compared to prior year, the People’s Daily Online reported, based on a brief by the China Electricity Council; but in 9 provinces, power consumption during the first half actually fell.

While electricity consumption in light industry rose by 2.1%, it dropped 0.5% in secondary industry and 0.9% in heavy industry.

So was the economy of China suddenly not growing at an annual rate of 7% during the first half?

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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