China’s Baihetan Dam starts generating electricity

• 3 years ago (2021-06-29)
• David Flin

Asia 892 Hydropower 131

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China’s Baihetan Dam, the second largest hydropower facility in the world, has started generating electricity for the first time. The dam is on the Jinsha River in southwest China; it has started operating its first two 1 GW generating units.

The dam is scheduled to be operating on 16 units with the same capacity by July 2022, giving a total power generation second only to the Three Gorges Dam. Both dams were built by the state-owned Three Gorges Group .

Baihetan Dam took four years to build and has a height of 289 metres.

President Xi Jinping said in a letter endorsing the project: “As a major project in China’s west-east power transmission programme, Baihetan is the largest and most technically difficult hydropower project currently under construction in the world.”

China will use UHV transmission technology to move power from the collection of dams in the southwest to Shanghai and other eastern cites.