China's highest-altitude hydropower station starts operation
The Yebatan Hydropower Station, the highest-altitude hyperbolic arch dam project under construction in China and a key project under the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), has officially started generating electricity with its first two power generation units coming online on Saturday.
This milestone marks significant progress in the development of the integrated "hydro-solar-wind" energy base along the upper reaches of the Jinsha River, the upper section of the Yangtze River, China's longest river.
Located at an elevation of 2,894 meters on the Jinsha River, the Yebatan Hydropower Station straddles Baiyu County in southwest China's Sichuan Province and Gongjue County in the neighboring Xizang Autonomous Region.
With a total installed capacity of 2.24 gigawatts, it is the largest hydropower station that has been commissioned in the upper reaches of the Jinsha River.
The project confronted a range of engineering challenges during construction, including high altitude, extreme cold, a towering arch dam, high ground stress, high burial depth, and a large-span underground powerhouse.
After nearly a decade of construction, the station successfully delivered its first kilowatt-hour of green electricity.
A major technical breakthrough during construction was the development of winter concrete pouring techniques suited to the plateau environment. For the first time in the industry, engineers achieved uninterrupted year-round concrete placement for a high-altitude arch dam.
Moreover, they extracted a 38.1-meter-long concrete core sample, the longest ever recorded in a dam project, providing valuable technical experience for future hydropower development in plateau regions.
"When fully operational, the station will be able to transmit the clean electricity it generated via a ±800 kV direct current transmission line from the upper reaches of the Jinsha River to Hubei Province in central China," said Xia Yong, chief engineer of the Yebatan Hydropower Station project at the state-owned China Huadian Corporation.
