Sep 20 - BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

China's increasing power demand is bringing business opportunities for electricity equipment and technology suppliers around the world, an on-going international exhibition was told Tuesday [20 September].

At the fifth Shanghai International Electricity Equipment and Technology Expo, which started on Tuesday, hundreds of overseas electric firms came for a slice of this deliciously lucrative pie.

"The steady development of China's economy tremendously increases the power demand from the society as a whole," said Xie Zhenhua, vice director of China Electric Enterprise Union.

Statistics from the State Power Grid said the gross electricity installed capacity of China amounted to 440m kW at the end of 2004. China generated 2.18 trillion kWh power in the year, ranking second in the world.

Experts say that China's installed capacity will rise to more than 1billion kiloW by 2020, with a total power consumption of 4.6 trillion kWh.

"This remarkable development trend with the growing shortage will make China's power market, at least in the next 15 years, a huge opportunity to the international corporations in this field," said Xie.

As a matter of fact, many transnational electric giants have already launched programmes or made plans that are oriented to seize this largest market in Eastern Asia.

Siemens Power Transmission and Distribution Group displayed a newly designed vacuum switch at the expo. Its product manager Li Weijie said the switch was especially devised after their deep probe into China's power market. It will be put into production next year with an expected production of 300m yuan (37m US dollars) within three years.

Li said that Siemens has already provided a number of transformer units for China's Three Gorges water resource project and that it also won a 300m yuan (37m US dollars) bid for another transformer project in the Southern Power Grid this April.

China encountered its most serious power shortage this summer. The consumption loads in eastern and northern China have both surpassed the peak amount of 2004, with the biggest gaps reaching 14m and 3m kW, respectively.

Zhao Yuzhu, deputy director of the State Electricity Dispatching and Telecommunication Centre, said China is speeding up its power generation infrastructure construction and boosting reforms in many state-owned power companies, and it also invites international power giants to alleviate the abject shortage.

The European electric giant ABB acquired a 2.6bn US dollar order in China last year. The corporation, which has already invested 600m US dollars in China, is currently planning to spend another 100m US dollars in building new factories and production lines in the coming two years.

"To us, China is a huge market full of opportunities and we are now playing a very important role in the country's development through sharing it with our technologies and helping it improve power supply security," said Peter Leupp, president of ABB China.

"Our great achievements indicate that we are capable of helping China out of the annoying power shortage in a reliable and energy- saving way," Leupp said.