China's Retailers Feel the Heat
HANGZHOU, China -- Holding a microphone close to her lips, Yao Yao serenades her classmates with a popular love song at the Yinledi karaoke club. She sings with her eyes shut, reflecting not so much her passion for the lyrics as a desire to keep sweat out of her eyes. It is above 30 degrees Celsius indoors: the acute power shortages that have dogged the city all summer have forced the club to forgo air conditioning a few hours each evening, under orders from the government.
"I sing until I'm drenched and can't take it anymore," says Ms. Yao, passing the microphone to a friend.
But few fans are so die-hard about their karaoke: roughly two-thirds of the club's 80 rooms are empty because of the sauna-like temperatures. It doesn't help that the escalators leading to the club's entrance have also been shut off to conserve electricity. Li Hui, one of the club's managers, estimates business has fallen about 30% from a year earlier.
Factories, it seems, aren't the only ones sweating it out in China this summer. The country's worst power shortages in recent memory are also forcing hotels, restaurants, shops and nightclubs to throttle back their air conditioners, dim the lights and, in some cases, cope with blackouts during peak business hours. In Hangzhou, the well-to-do capital of coastal Zhejiang province, hotel managers groan about guests getting trapped in elevators during outages, shop clerks labor to hawk televisions that are switched off, and KFC and other restaurants in the main shopping district lack the electricity to open at lunchtime.
China's consumer economy was supposed to be sheltered from the power crunch. Last year, after it became clear that central-government planners had grossly underestimated the country's electricity needs, they arranged for the manufacturing sector to shoulder the impact until enough new power plants could be built to solve the problem (the shortages should be fully resolved by mid-2006, officials say). Factories have experienced production delays and rising costs, but are somewhat resilient because they can shift production to the middle of the night when electricity is in lower demand.
Retail businesses don't have that luxury. How much money the shortages are costing isn't easy to sort out, and official estimates haven't been made public. State media have cited a rule of thumb: for each kilowatt-hour power plants come up short, the economy loses six yuan, or just more than 70 cents. Marry that figure with the State Electricity Regulatory Commission's assumption that the country will fall short by 60 billion kilowatt-hours this year, costing the economy 360 billion yuan ($43.5 billion) in 2004.
The shortages aren't so bad that experts are worried about social unrest; the government has worked hard to keep electricity flowing to residential areas, at least in the evenings when most people are home. The outages even offer a silver lining: they are helping Beijing slow economic growth from a currently unsustainable clip. But leaders want to see the slowdown occur in manufacturing, not in the increasingly important consumer sector.
Turning a profit has, nonetheless, become tougher for businesses like the Sovereign Shark restaurant in Hangzhou. Ma?tre d' Chen Xiaoyan isn't allowed to let the dining room's temperature fall below 26 degrees Celsius without risking a 10-day suspension of electricity if the power-company catches them. The climate "doesn't encourage customers' appetites," she says, and orders for their signature dish -- a piping-hot bowl of shark's fin soup -- have slumped.
A stopgap response to the problem has been some creative cooking. One new menu item: Honey Dew Shark's Brain. A chef slices the tops off melons, scoops out the seeds and pours in gelatinous dollops of chilled shark brain -- a dessert that, by his account, "sells well."
Clothing sales, too, have been a casualty of the heat. "We girls don't bother trying on dresses; it's hot and we're sweating," says Yang Chuliang, who edits the Hangzhou Morning Express newspaper.
Some cities are employing high-tech gadgetry to monitor power consumption. Up the Yangtze River from Shanghai in the muggy city of Wuhan, where even nighttime temperatures have been hovering above 30 degrees Celsius recently, the power company has installed remote-control devices to track the power usage of 700 hotels, restaurants and factories. If there is a need to counterbalance a heavy load on the grid, the electricity company sends instructions at the speed of light to green boxes hanging on the walls of businesses. A liquid-crystal display on the boxes commands businesses to immediately limit consumption to a certain amount.
Receiving an instruction can be unnerving. In a room packed with transformers and monitoring equipment at the Yangtze Hotel, Wei Xiaoxun scrambles to respond to the piercing alarm emitted by a green box. It is a false alarm this time. But if Mr. Wei, who is in charge of the hotel's electricity, fails to respond within 10 minutes to an actual instruction, all electricity to the hotel is cut automatically. "Someone always has to stand guard," Mr. Wei says. "You can't go out for a bite to eat unless someone is standing in. You never know when an order will come."
不能承受的缺电之痛
在杭州的银乐迪歌厅里，瑶瑶手拿著麦克风为她的同学哼唱著一首流行歌曲。她闭著眼睛、有气无力地唱著歌曲，因为房间里的温度已经超过30摄氏度，酷热使她意兴阑珊。
这一幕就出现在今年整个夏天始终为电力短缺所困扰的杭州市。迫于政府的要求，银乐迪每天晚上不得不把空调关掉几个小时。
瑶瑶把麦克风递给她的朋友，并说道，“我不能再唱了，我已经浑身湿透了，再也支撑不下去了。“
毕竟，像瑶瑶那样痴情于卡拉OK的人只是少数：银乐迪总共80个包厢有近三分之二是空荡荡的，因为待在那里面简直就像蒸桑拿浴。另外，为了节省电力消耗，银乐迪不得不把引领客人进入包厢的扶梯关闭了，这也是造成客流量下降的原因。银乐迪的营运部主任李慧估计，业务量比上年同期下降了约30%。
看起来，制造业并不是今年夏天中国唯一饱受缺电煎熬的行业。多年不遇的电力短缺迫使酒店、餐馆、商店和夜总会压缩空调使用时间，把灯光亮度调暗，甚至有些时候还要应付在营业高峰时期无电可用的局面。在杭州，零售业的电力短缺现象比比皆是：酒店经理抱怨说，停电造成酒店客人被困在电梯里；商店里面的销售人员费尽口舌地向顾客兜售未开机的电视机；主要购物街区的肯德基(KFC)和其他餐馆在午餐时间因为停电而无法开工。
中国的消费领域本不应遭受缺电之苦。去年，在中央政府决策者意识到全国的用电需求被严重低估之后，他们要求制造业在新电厂建成之前为了顾全大局做出牺牲。政府官员表示，2006年中期，随著新电厂的投入使用，用电紧张的局面将得到全面解决。缺电给制造业带来了生产延迟、成本上升等不利影响，但制造业企业显现出了一定程度的承受力，因为他们可以在用电需求较低的午夜时分进行生产。
但零售业就没那么幸运了。电力供应紧张造成的损失难以估计，政府对此也从未公开披露。但官方媒体曾经报导过，每出现一度电的供应不足，就会给国民经济带来人民币6元（合70多美分）的损失。而国家电力监管委员会(State Electricity Regulatory Commission)估计今年中国的用电缺口达到600亿千瓦时。把这两个数字相乘便可推断出，电力供应紧张使2004年的中国经济蒙受了3,600亿元（合435亿美元）的损失。
用电紧张并未严重到像某些专家担心的那样引发社会动乱的地步。政府正在想方设法确保居民用电，至少要确保傍晚时分的用电供应，因为此时大部分居民都待在家里。但电力紧缺带来的也不全都是坏处。中国政府正力图将目前难以为系的经济增长步伐放缓，电力紧缺可以起到一臂之力。但中央领导人希望的是制造业增长放缓，而不是重要性与日俱增的消费领域。
不过，至尊鲨鱼大酒店(Sovereign Shark)这类餐馆赚钱可没有以前那样容易了。餐厅领班陈晓燕始终提心吊胆，谨防餐厅温度降至摄氏26度以下。否则，如果被电力公司发现的话，就会接到停止用电10天的罚单。她表示，餐厅里的气温无法刺激顾客的胃口，餐馆的招牌菜──鱼翅汤的销量骤减。
这家餐馆用推出独具创意的菜肴来应对这种局面。该餐馆推出了一道新菜──香瓜鱼脑：一位厨师把瓜切开，掏出瓜籽，然后把呈凝胶状的冰镇鲨鱼脑倒进去。这道甜点的销路非常好。
炎炎夏日也灼伤了服装的销售。《今日早报》的编辑杨初亮表示，女孩子都懒得去试穿衣服，因为商店里面热得让人汗流浃背。
一些城市运用了高科技手段来监控用电量。从上海沿著长江逆流而上到达武汉，近些日子武汉夜晚的温度都在30摄氏度以上。电力公司已经在700家酒店、餐馆和工厂里安装了遥控装置来监控他们的用电量。如果电网超负荷运转，电力公司就会发出指令，指令便以光速传送到安装在这些企业墙壁上的绿盒子里。随后，绿盒子的液晶显示屏会立即显示出指令，要求企业将用电量控制在一定范围内。
察看是否接到指令是件非常痛苦的事。在扬子江大酒店(Yangtze Hotel)一间堆满变压器和监测设备的房间里，魏晓迅听到绿盒子发出尖声的警报之后立即做出反应，不过，虚惊一场，这次是个误报。但如果魏未能在10分钟内对真的指令做出反应，扬子江大酒店所有房间的电力供应就会自动切断。魏晓迅表示，时时刻刻得有人保持警惕，在没有人接班的情况下甚至不能出去吃饭；谁也不知道什么时候这个绿盒子就会收到指令。
