State Grid Corp of China, the world’s biggest utility and a pioneer of UHV technology, plans to spend $100bn by 2017 on 20 UHV lines in China, a company executive said.
Reuters/Beijing
China has started operating another multibillion-dollar ultra-high voltage (UHV) power line, connecting its second-largest hydropower plant in the landlocked west to a province on the east coast, the official China Energy News reported yesterday.
The world’s No 2 economy has struggled to expand its grid to keep up with growing power demand, with most of its new energy supplies in the far west, while demand is in the east and south.
State Grid Corp of China (SGCC), the world’s biggest utility and a pioneer of UHV technology, plans to spend 620bn yuan ($100bn) by 2017 on 20 UHV lines in China, a company executive said last August. The project has been controversial with critics arguing SGCC is betting too much on costly and untested technology that could expose the system to blackouts.
The firm has said that UHV lines are reliable and designed to prevent outages. The latest UHV line spans five provinces – Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi and Zhejiang – and cost about 19.7bn yuan ($3.2bn).
It will be part of a UHV complex that will ship about 40bn kilowatt hours of electricity a year from the hydropower-rich southwestern regions to eastern consuming hubs, China Energy News said.
That would be equivalent to conserving 12.28mn tonnes of standard coal and reducing carbon dioxide emissions of 34mn tonnes every year.
The third such project run by SGCC, a 1,653-kilometre line that starts in the southwestern province of Sichuan and ends in Zhejiang, started operating last week, the paper said.
That coincided with the start of full operations at the Xiluodu hydropower station, the country’s second largest in terms of capacity.
The UHV lines would allow China to build power plants near coal mines or gas fields before sending electricity rather than coal across country.
This would free up rail capacity and could reduce the need for coal and gas imports.