Industrial demand for electricity may continue to slump in the second half of the year

The SERC recently issued a report stating that there have been five positive changes in the operation of electricity during the first half of this year. The main manifestations are the obvious effects of structural adjustments in electricity use, the proportion of electricity consumed in high-energy-consuming industries has decreased, and the proportion of clean energy power generation has increased. At the same time, SERC expects that the entire society will use about 5.1 trillion kwh of electricity, a year-on-year increase of 7%.

The reporter noted that the above-mentioned forecast of electricity consumption for the whole year is basically the same as the “2012 National Electricity Supply and Demand Situation Analysis and Forecast Report” issued by the CEPD at the beginning of the year, but the forecast of annual electricity consumption growth is reduced by 2.5 percentage point. This shows that in the past six months, the demand for macro electricity has not yet significantly increased, and the demand for industrial electricity in the second half of the year may still remain weak.

According to the SERC, the changes in the electricity consumption structure and the elasticity of electricity consumption in the first half of the year reflect that the economic restructuring has achieved remarkable results. In the first half of the year, China's unit GDP power consumption decreased by 5.01% compared with the same period of last year, and the first, second and third industries decreased by 11.93%, 4.54% and 1.60%, respectively. In addition, the proportion of household electrical power consumed by the tertiary industry and urban and rural residents has gradually increased, with an increase of 0.67 and 0.81 percentage points respectively over the same period of last year.

The elasticity coefficient of electricity consumption was only 0.72 in the first half of the year, which was a decrease of 0.54 from the same period of last year. The analysis of the trend of changes still has a tendency to continue to decline. In addition, the proportion of electricity consumed by the four high-energy-consuming industries decreased. From January to June this year, the four high energy-consuming industries accounted for 31.99% of the total society, a decrease of 1.24 percentage points from the same period of last year.

Compared with the traditional energy consumption, the proportion of clean energy power generation increased by 0.93 percentage points over the same period of last year, accounting for 16.91% of the total power generation.

According to the monitoring by the SERC, in the first half of the year, a total of 288 billion kilowatt-hours of clean energy was consumed across the country. Among them, 291.2 billion kWh of hydropower, up 9.9% year-on-year, consumed 50.4 billion kWh of wind power, up 26.8% year-on-year, and consumed 46.4 billion kWh of nuclear power, up 11.9% year-on-year.