The arctic vortex across the United States has had a negative impact causing rare winter power interruptions for US spinning mills in North and South Carolina, including Frontier Spinning Mills, the second-largest yarn producer in the United States. The mills had to stop operations on requests from their power supplier, Duke Energy.
American cotton traders, ginners and buyers have already been dealing with tight supplies and the late processing of a small crop in the world's top exporter. Now with the spinning mills forced to stop work has affected spinning of about 2,000 bales of cotton. Sources say that while the figure represents just a fraction of Frontier's annual demand for some 940,000 480-lb bales, but it also means opportunity lost including loss of production.
Duke Energy, the nation's largest power supplier twice had to ask industrial customers in the Carolinas to curtail power usage this month as snow and cold continued to make an impact. Duke Energy witnessed a record energy usage on January 7, 2014 of 20,246 megawatt-hours, surpassing December 2010's record of 18,985 megawatt-hours.
Experts say, though the impact of power cut on the textile industry is minimal at the moment, the blow comes at a time when companies around the world are looking at setting up shop in the United States, due to lower-cost and reliable energy coupled with shifting trade flows and improving technology.
www.frontierspinningmills.com
