Tokyo (Platts)--13Mar2011/830 am EDT/1230 GMT
Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Banri Kaieda said Sunday that Tokyo Electric Power Company's supply capacity will be short by 10GW from Monday, leaving the company with a "significant shortage of electricity." Kaieda told a press conference, televised by public broadcaster NHK, that Tepco's supply capacity would only be about 31 GW against estimated power demand of 41 GW from Monday. He said Tepco's decision to implement rolling blackouts in areas that it serves was "inevitable." NHK separately reported that Tepco decided to run its planned power outages from 6:20 am to 10pm from Monday by dividing its regions into five and running the outages in three-hour slots. Kaieda said Tohoku Electric, which is also facing a complete outage at its Onagawa nuclear power plant, is not facing as severe a shortage of power as Tepco since the regions it serves were more severely affected by Friday's massive earthquake and demand for power has fallen. --Takeo Kumagai, takeo_kumagai@platts.comSimilar stories appear in Electric Power Daily. See more information at http://bit.ly/ElectricPowerDaily