China's Baihetan Hydropower Project

 

Image Courtesy: @ChinaMissionVie/ Twitter

China's Baihetan hydropower facility—claimed to be the largest hydropower station under constructionin the world—on Yangtze river's upstream branch began generating electricity for the first time on 28 June. According to the state media, after a three-day trial, the project’s first two 1-gigawatt (GW) turbines will begin functioning and when completed in July 2022, it will have 16 such units, making the plant’s total generation capacity second only to the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province.

Baihetan dam, located on the border between the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, was built by the China Three Gorges Corporation. It is part of a series of dams on the Jinsha River, which is the Yangtze's upstream branch. Despite the fact that the corporation claimed it was one of China's largest and most difficult engineering projects, with a dam height of 289 metres (948 feet), construction took only four years. As per the state-run media CCTV, almost $34.07 billion has been invested in this project—which is part of a national plan to generate electricity and transmit it to high-energy-consumption areas along the eastern coast, as well as to improve water flow control during the flood season.

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a letter to the station on 28 June, congratulating it on the start-up of its first two generating units. He said that Baihetan is the world's largest and most technically difficult hydropower project and it is a major project in China's west-east power transmission programme. Xi also expressed the expectation that all the builders and related parties would advance the plant’s follow-up work and contribute more to attaining the country's carbon-peak and carbon-neutrality targets, as well as supporting the country's comprehensive green transformation of economic and social growth. The Xinhua news agency said: “With a total installed capacity of 16 million kilowatts, the hydropower station is equipped with 16 hydro-generating units, each with a capacity of 1 million kilowatts, the largest single-unit capacity in the world.”

However, the construction of an ultra-high voltage (UHV) power transmission line between Baihetan and Jiangsu's eastern province began in late 2020 and is projected to be completed in 2022. Another UHV project, from Baihetan to Zhejiang Province in eastern China, is awaiting permission from Beijing. According to reports, earlier in June, all 12 units of the Wudongde hydropower facility, the world's seventh-largest, on the Jinsha River near the Yunnan-Sichuan border, were also operationalized. This station—whose construction began in late 2015 and started to generate electricity in June 2020—is an important project in China's west-east power transmission programme, with a total installed capacity of 10.2 million kilowatts.

Some eastern and central China provinces with higher populations and more established economies have experienced electricity shortages during peak demand periods. Similarly, regions that used to rely on coal for electricity generation are trying to find clean power sources, primarily from western China amid pressure from Beijing. Reuters reported that Sichuan province's five-year plan, covering the years 2021-2025, aims to complete the construction of 10 hydropower plants and begin construction on another 7.

Environmentalists have criticised the Yangtze River's large-scale damming and its tributaries, claiming that the river's over-engineering has devastated significant habitats and harmed natural flood basins. But according to the latest report by CCTV, experts and residents have said that in the Baihetan Dam area, proactive steps have been taken to safeguard biodiversity. Chen Yang, the deputy director of the Technology Administration Office of Baihetan Engineering & Construction Department said: "We built a botanic garden, where we've transplanted trees more than 100 years old from the area that'll be submerged by the dam reservoir and some other local plants as well. It currently hosts 55 types of plants and the total number of them is about 20,000."

It was also stated that the authorities have constructed a fish breeding station and artificial fish nests for local aquatic species, as well as a fish collection system that transports fish from the lower to the upper side of the dam, ensuring the normal flow of fish migration traffic both upstream and downstream. However, Chen and his colleagues plan to continue scientific research on ecological restoration, including soil improvement on high and steep slopes, which will benefit the dry-hot valley regions and the entire Jinsha River Basin.