National electricity consumption last Friday set a new record.

Usage jumped to 5.967 billion kilowatt-hour (kWh), breaking the historical high set on July 29 last year, according to statistics from National Power Dispatching and Communication Centre.

Figures from the centre also show this summer's power consumption reached its peak 10 days earlier than last year.

Many provinces are facing power shortages.

Due to the high temperature throughout the country, power consumption began to skyrocket nationwide on June 6. There was a similar spike in late June last year.

Power shortages are becoming serious in East China and South China's Guangdong Province. In North China electricity is also in great demand.

A new record-high load in the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan power grid was 19.68 million kilowatts last Friday.

In the past six months, the power on the grid was switched off 625 times to limit consumption.

In North China's Shanxi Province, power has also been cut off 207 times this year and in North China's Hebei Province, more than 2,000 times.

In Central China, the situation is no less severe. Many power plants do not have adequate coal reserves and some of them such as the Xiangfan Power Plant and Jingmen Power Plant in Hubei Province have stopped part of their operations.

Officials say at least 1 million kilowatts cannot be generated due to coal shortages and power shortages this summer have been estimated at more than 20 million kilowatts.

Experts say proper allocation may alleviate the severe electricity shortage.

Peak power consumption hours are different in each province and using these time differences can help deal with the shortages.

On June 6, a week-long nationwide campaign to educate the public about energy conservation kicked off.

To ensure a stable power supply, Beijing will introduce different electricity prices for different hours.

The prices will go up 11 per cent during peak hours in the third quarter of the year.

Beijing Vice-Mayor Zhang Mao warned last Tuesday that the city, which imports 59 per cent of its power from other parts of the country, might impose blackouts this summer as power shortages worsen nationwide.

Meanwhile, the average national power reliability - the amount of time residents live with power per year - was 99.866 per cent, the first drop in a decade.

That means residents in cities and townships lived without power for an average of 11 hours and 43 minutes a year, three and a half hours more than in 2002, said Lu Qizhou, deputy general manager of State Grid Corporation (SGC).

Twenty-four provinces imposed switch-offs to limit power consumption during the first four months this year while only 22 provinces did so last year.

According to rough statistics, there are more than 40,000 cases of damaged SGC equipment or facilities between 2001 to 2003, with damage pegged at 300 million yuan (US$36.3 million).

In the first quarter this year, there were 1,925 cases of damaged or stolen equipment or facilities.

The damage is blamed for 70 per cent of the problems with transmission equipment.