Power crunch, chip shortage, green goal: China's challenges are growing

State planners have to balance their industrial ambitions with focus on lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions.

As a worsening power shortage ripples through China Inc., with provinces asking high-energy industries to curtail usage, semiconductor machinery makers and manufacturers along the electric-vehicle supply chain have had to shutter production. That the outages are now hitting such key sectors is worrying.

These areas are major priorities for Beijing and underpin its economic blueprint released earlier this year. If state planners can’t balance their industrial ambitions with their focus on lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions--also a part of the latest Five-Year Plan--it’s worth wondering how far the power crisis could go.

An inability to manage competing goals could end up