Let's move on now and talk about China's southwestern province of Sichuan, which has restored most power supplies for industries and businesses. This happened by Sunday at noon, according to State television. Joining us to discuss this Downmotile Bloomberg, Asia Energy Reporter with us in Beijing. So I thing starting to get a little bit better from when we spoke to you last week down because we're kind of seeing
a little bit of cooler weather as well. Yeah, Juels, we're seeing a lot of a lot of relief from the weather gods. It started raining over the weekend in Sichuan and the weather has dropped precipitously. Air conditioning demand dropped from about twenty four gigawatts a week ago to about twelve gigawatts on Sunday, and hydropower generation, which is pretty low right now, has inched up a little bit as well. That means that there's a little bit more
of a cushion for the power system. So the province was able to stop. It's you know, full cutoff of power industrial facilities. There are still some curbs and it hasn't been a power restored to factories, but it's a lot better than it was this time last week, and so cooler weather reducing air conditioning mind as well tell us that I guess the impact HEATA factories and what kind of restarting we're seeing. Well, we're seeing a Honda, for example, is looking to restart their power parts factory
in the city. We're still waiting as companies kind of wake up to this news this morning for more releases on specifics as far as who's restarting a capacity, who's just sort of slowly ramping up production. Um, it's going to be interesting to see because, as you know, Sichuan is a major hub for a couple of industries, including e V batteries and solar panels, So people will be sort of carefully watching those industries to see how quickly they can ramp up production again and get the supply
chain for their industries. Back on track, I mentioned that we are seeing a little bit of cooler weather. What what are we expecting. Is it going to be some like quite significant change in rain or what is actually expected? Yeah, you know, I mean you never exactly know what the weather, but it is very very good in the forecast right now. So Sichuan has had the worst drought in more than
sixty years since the beginning of July. But for the next couple of days, they're expecting rainfall to be about above average, so so hopefully a lot of water to
soak back into these depleted reservoirs. And then we're also going to see cooler weather move across China into the eastern parts in the south parts of the country, which while they haven't had an extreme power such situation as sich one, they've also seen factories have to sort of shift shift their operations around to use power at off peak times because there wasn't enough power to go around.
So that might start to ease a little bit as we get to the end of this week and next weekend, and then you know, hopefully now we'll be in September and we'll start to get cooler weather and we'll have a month or two of relief from that. What our authorities doing to try and ensure that this doesn't happen again. Is there any kind of preparation for looking at potentially
other different resources and stockpiling too. Yeah, you know, there's a couple of things that they're doing on a national level. What China has done this year is really increased coal production to and boost their coal inventories around the country to be able to have stockpiles here if if it's necessary. Sichuan and UH and its neighbor Union are sort of particularly unique provinces because they have historically been very reliant
on hydro power. Sichuan it gets about of its power capacity from its big dams along the Once River and other parts UH, and so they were just really affected by this historic drought here. UM. But China is looking at a couple of specific measures to deal with the Sichuan issue. One is, you know, just sort of increasing power capacity generation UM. You know that means windmills and solar plants, but also probably coal and gas power plants
to deal with with peaks. And the other is looking at increasing building of power lines to get more UM grid interconnectedness because you know, this whole time that Sichuan was shut off, there were other parts of the country that had plenty of excess power capacity just didn't have an infrastructure to move it down to Sishuan. So better interconnecting the regional grids within the country could go a long way to solving these issues in the future. And
just getting back to the weather. The great surround Bloomberg about rain seating drones. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is something that China specializes in. They have the They basically fly airplanes or drones into the sky whenever the humidity levels rise enough, and they dropped these rain seating technology. It's it's usually like silver iodide or or different rods that are designed to sort of pull the moisture in the air together until it's dense enough that
rain drop. Let's fall in the rain actually instead of you know, staying up as water vapor in the atmosphere drops down onto the ground and you know, helps crops and helps rain. They've done this before the Olympics. For example, in two thousand and eight, they seated the rain clouds to make sure it rain before the Olympics so the skies were clear when the athletes came as. China has
a long and proud history of doing it. The it seems we've worked this weekend as the rain came down, although scientists are still sort of I would say up in the air about how it actually is all right down Thank you as always down Myrtel Bloomberg, Asia Energy Reporter with US in Beijings and fascinating reporting by the team on what is happening in Situan.