In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, water is released from a dam at Baihetan Hydropower Station in Ningnan County in southwestern China’s Sichuan province.
The first two production units of the world’s second-largest hydroelectric dam in southwestern China were officially commissioned on Monday, the government announced.
The Beihetan Dam on the Jinsha River, a tributary of the Yangtze, is part of Chinese efforts to curb rising demand for fossil fuels by creating more hydroelectric capacity at a time when dams in other countries have collapsed due to environmental complaints.
The announcement comes ahead of this week’s celebration of the official 100th anniversary of the 1921 founding of the ruling Communist Party.
Plans for the 289-metre-high (954-foot-high) Baihetan Dam call for 16 generating units with a capacity of 1 million kilowatts each. It will be second in size after the Three Gorges Dam opened on the Yangtze in 2003 with a generating capacity of 22.5 million kWh.
Both were built by state-owned Three Gorges Group Corp, the world’s largest investor in hydro, solar and wind generation.
Hydropower is losing support in other countries due to complaints of flooding communities and agricultural land and disrupting the ecology of rivers, threatening fish and other species.
Despite criticism from environmentalists, Chinese leaders are building more dams in an effort to reduce dependence on coal and curb rising demand for imported oil and gas.
China is a leader in developing ultra-high-voltage, or UHV, transmission technology to transfer power from dams in the southwest to Shanghai and other eastern cities.
Once fully operational, Baihetan Hydropower Station should eliminate the need to burn 20 million tons of coal annually, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the Three Gorges Group as saying.
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