TOKYO (MNI) – Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Sunday evening that
he had endorsed the decision by Tokyo Electric Power Co to temporarily
suspend electricity supplies to many cities in suburban Tokyo and
neighbouring provinces for three to six hours daily, starting Monday.

The peak-time power demand in the nine prefectures in eastern Japan
covered by TEPCO is estimated at 41 million kilowatts for Monday,
surpassing its current supply capacity of only 31 million kilowatts that
has been reduced by the damage from Friday’s massive earthquake, Kan
told a news conference.

Tokyo Electric has never conducted a planned power cut of this
scale since its inception in 1951.

Most of Tokyo’s central 23 districts — where government offices
and parliament as well as financial and business districts are located
— are exempted from the power cut that will be rotated among five
groups of grids.

Tokyo Electric plans to continue through end-April but the utility
firm will dispatch power-supply trucks to hospitals during this period,
media reports said.

The main source of its power generation, from two nuclear power
plants in the northern prefecture of Fukushima, has been shut down after
the most powerful earthquake in Japan’s history wreaked havoc on
northern to eastern Pacific coast cities.

Power outage in the quake-hit areas and damage of high tsunami
waves are making it difficult to cool off fuel rods in the reactors that
seem to be losing coolant. In order to ease rising pressure in the
reactors, TEPCO is letting some radioactive steam out of the
plants through vents.

TEPCO’s thermal power plants on the coast have also been damaged by
the tsunami attacks, leading to an unprecedented shortage of its power
supply capacity.

Eastern Japanese power companies can receive some backup
electricity from their western Japanese counterparts but its amount is
limited as electricity has to go through transformers from one region to
the other as they are operating on two different power generating
systems.

The temporary blackout that shift from grid to grid will force
factories, offices and retail stores to suspend operations unless they
have backup generators. Many homes will lose lights and electric
heating.

Traffic lights will also lose power supplies and railroad companies
in Tokyo said they plan to slash operations and suspend train services
in affected areas during the blackout, which is expected to snarl
commuters.

Some large consumers of electricities have already began to save
power by shorting business hours and suspending operations.

Water supplies can also be affected by the power cut in some areas
of eastern Japan where damage to utilities by the earthquake has been
limited.

Many households are stocking up supplies of food, drinking water
and emergency goods including flash lights and batteries.

tokyo@marketnews.com
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