China is in the midst of a power supply crisis that has turned critical in recent days – threatening entire power grids and prompting analysts to slash economic growth forecasts for the year.

In the past month, 16 out of 31 provincial jurisdictions – from industrial powerhouses in the south such as Guangdong to the rust belt in the northeast – have rolled out electricity-rationing measures, triggering widespread alarm among much of the population and plunging the nation’s industrial sector into chaos.

“The situation worsened over the past weekend,” Lu Ting, chief economist at Nomura, wrote in a note on Monday, adding that the widespread outages are not limited to factories…

Analysts have pointed to both a shortage of coal and Beijing’s push to meet emission-reduction targets, and they warn that further disruptions risk aggravating inflation while pummeling production.