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JAKARTA - INDONESIA will move manufacturers' working hours to weekends in a bid to avoid prolonged rolling blackouts across the country, the vice president said on Friday.
The move, which will also see working hours shifted to off-peak times, has been brought in to avoid burdening the overstrained grid during peak hours.
'A joint ministerial decree will be signed this afternoon, and will become effective in August,' Mr Jusuf Kalla told Dow Jones Newsires, without giving further details.
State power monopoly PLN started two weeks of rolling blackouts in Jakarta on Friday after six months of frequent outages on the dense Java-Bali grid cost businesses millions of dollars in losses.
The rolling blackouts in Jakarta are officially due to maintenance work that will interrupt gas supplies to two state-owned generating stations in North Jakarta, but analysts have blamed the country's crumbling infrastructure.
Analysts have warned electricity shortages could limit economic growth and discourage local and foreign investment in South-east Asia's largest economy.
'The economy will not be able to grow above six per cent if (PLN) can't increase supply by nine per cent annually,' said Mr Purbaya Sadewa, chief economist at the state-owned investment bank PT Danareksa.
Rising demand for electricity has led to increasing numbers of blackouts across the country in the past few years despite its vast resources of oil, natural gas, coal and geothermal energy.
The power crisis appears to be deteriorating even though only 53 per cent of the archipelago's 234 million people has access to electricity.
The government is planning to boost capacity by some 30 per cent to about 40,000 megawatts by 2011, but the first new power station is not expected to be operational until mid-2009.
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