Passing dark nights in electricitystarved North Korea

WONSAN: At the turbine hall at North Korea’s Wonsan Number 5 hydropower station, a placard mounted on a wall proclaims: “Prosperous and Powerful Nation”. But when it comes to electricity the North is anything but.

The country has made rapid progress in its weapons programme under leader Kim Jong-un, detonating what it said was an hydrogen bomb last month and launching intercontinental missiles that apparently bring much of the United States mainland into range.

However, nearly 70 years after it was founded, the

North suffers from perennial energy shortages, epitomised by satellite photos of the country at night, showing it as a largely dark quadrilateral between the bright lights of China and the South.

Solar panels are ubiquitous across the city’s balconies and students gather under streetlights at night.

Officials acknowledge the scarcity, with the state KCNA news agency quoting prime minister Pak Pong Ju referring to “the nation’s acute shortage of electricity” while attending the groundbreaking earlier this year for a new Tanchon hydropower station.

It was not always thus. Under Japanese colonial rule northern Korea was developed as the industrial hub, with the southern part regarded as an agrarian backwater.

But after the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the North lost its access to heavily subsidised spare parts and technical expertise, and electricity generation nosedived.

AFP FILE Pyongyang is unusually dim for a capital city, the pale glow emerging from apartments often outshone by the moon.