WCA January 2019

From the Americas The court, which requires three judges to rule on cases, is now down to three. It usually has seven members, but Washington has blocked appointments and reappointments.  The Times reported that Mr Azevêdo, while accepting “valid” criticism over lack of progress in the WTO, asserted that it is the very foundation on which world trade is built. “It took many decades of painstaking work from governments around the world to build the trading system that we have today,” the WTO chief told his audience in London in October. “The system may not be perfect, but it is essential.”  On the eve of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and its sister institution, the World Bank, with finance ministers and central bankers from the IMF’s 189 member nations, the fund cut its global growth forecast for the first time in more than two years. The Washington-based lender on 9 th October projected global expansion of 3.7 per cent in 2018 and again in 2019, down from a 3.9 per cent projection of three months earlier. The 2018 forecast for the USA was left unchanged but the fund cut its US expectation for 2019, citing the impact of escalating trade tensions. While the global economy for 2018 was seen as still on track to match its 2017 pace, the strongest since 2011, risks to the global outlook had risen since the summer and tilt to the downside, the IMF said from Bali, Indonesia, in October. Perceived threats include a further inflaming of trade tensions between the USA and countries including China, and a sharper-than-expect- ed rise in interest rates, which would accelerate capital flight from emerging markets. If the trade war between the USA and China continues, it could take a significant bite out of global growth, according to the IMF. In a scenario in which US President Donald Trump follows through on all his threats, including global duties on cars, the fund estimates global output could fall by more than 0.8 per cent in 2020 and remain 0.4 per cent below its trend line over the long term. IMF models indicate that output could fall by more than 1.6 per cent in China and over 0.9 per cent in the USA in 2019. A method of balancing supply and demand in the energy grid benefits an Australian-owned steel mill in the US Midwest The Australian Financial Review has called attention to a mechanism employed by North Star Steel (Delta, Ohio) that delivers the company’s Australian owner significant savings on its US power bill. A unit of BlueScope Steel, of Melbourne, North Star is paid a monthly fee for standing ready to cut power usage whenever this is required to keep Ohio’s electric grid stable and prevent blackouts. (“How BlueScope Steel Saves 35 Per Cent on Its Power Bill in Ohio,” 7 th October). The Financial Review ’s Ben Potter Steel

reported that the local power company, Toledo Edison, then bids the capacity made available from its customers into a “demand response” programme run by PJM, a huge utility spanning a dozen northeastern states and Washington DC. PJM has had as much as six per cent of total capacity under demand response in recent years. Test runs aside, wrote Mr Potter, North Star Steel has been called upon only twice in this century to dial its usage back in earnest. But according to Matthew Morris, the mill’s reliability and energy manager, the monthly payment it receives for its readiness to surrender the bulk of its power demand for about four hours reduces its power bill by some 35 per cent. To be so rarely inconvenienced in exchange for such a big savings is a great deal for a large industrial energy user in a fiercely competitive industry, Mr Morris told the Australian Financial Review from Delta. It is, he said, “a very important lever that you can control” for a steel company with competitors in other states whose electricity rates may be lower.  Mr Potter explained that North Star’s demand response arrangement has its origins in the energy market deregulation that spread across some USA states in the late 1990s. Ohio was one of the early states to deregulate. Its business power rates jumped, while the rates charged to North Star’s competitors in regulated states stayed low. To give energy-hungry businesses like North Star a break, Ohio’s public utilities regulator arranged for Toledo Edison and other “legacy utilities” to offer customers demand response for a fee. Originally set for the summer months only but now year-round, the programme has been extended to 2024, by which time North Star will be able to bid its swing capacity directly into PJM’s demand-response auction.  The Melbourne-based Mr Potter noted that demand response is not unknown in Australia, which is struggling to manage the entry of variable wind and solar energy into the grid. But it has been held back there by regulatory constraints and a historic abundance of cheap power. Elsewhere in steel . . .  On an ecological note, scientists under the leadership of Dr Susan Williams of the University of California, Davis, made innovative use of reinforcing steel rod (rebar) to test a method of rehabilitating a coral reef in the southwest Pacific Ocean. From 2013 to 2015, coral fragments were affixed to 11,000 “spiders” – 3.5ft 2 structures made from rust-protected rebar – and anchored in coral rubble across a 75,000ft 2 stretch of the degraded reef. Coral growth on the spiders from 2014 to 2017 was evaluated. As reported by Priya Shukla in Forbes (7 th October), while coral growth on the spiders rarely reached that seen at a nearby undamaged site, corals on and around the spiders increased up to 60 per cent over the course of the surveys. Additionally, these corals did not appear to bleach after intense temperature spikes (to over 86ºF) in the seawater. Ms Shukla, a PhD student at UC Davis, observed, “This was especially intriguing given that widespread coral bleaching events were occurring elsewhere in the world during this time.”

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2019

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