Shenzhen's Circuit Breaker for Power Pricing

(Beijing) -- Shenzhen has been picked as ground zero for a Chinese government initiative aimed at letting market forces, rather than power transmission companies, determine what end-users pay for electricity.

Under a three-year pilot project launched in January, businesses and consumers in this southern city will see the transmission-fee portions of their power bills cut an average 6 percent from 2014 levels. The reduction reflects a government decision to peg these fees to the real – not inflated – costs of transmitting electricity from power plants to users.