All 6 Units of Huaneng Xiaowan Power Station Put into Operation with Annual Clean Power Generation of 19 Billion KWh

At zero o’clock on August 22, unit 6 of Huaneng Xiaowan Hydropower Station completed the 72-hour test run without a hitch and was officially synchronized with the grid for power generation. This marks that all 6 units of the station, totaling 4.2 GW, have been put into operation.

Huaneng Xiaowan Hydropower Station is a milestone project of implementing the national strategy for a large-scale development of the western regions and transmission of electricity from the western to the eastern regions. It is also an engineering project involving the largest single-project investment in the history of the province. As a world-class project, the station is the second cascade of the “2-reservoir and 8-cascade” development of the middle and lower reaches of Lancang River, with 6 installed hydro turbine generator units of 700MW each, which is the largest single-unit capacity available now in the world for such a water head segment. Upon completion, the station has a total reservoir capacity of 14.9 billion m3. Functioning primarily for power generation, the project also produces comprehensive utilization benefits in flood control, irrigation, sand barring and navigation. It will provide a guaranteed out put of 19 billion KWh and pay nearly 1.2 billion Yuan of local and state tax a year, according to a calculation based on the average annual output.

The construction of Huaneng Xiaowan Hydropower Station was started on January 20, 2002 and the river was dammed on October 25, 2004, one year ahead of schedule. The accumulated out put of the station has reached 8.5 billion KWh since its first unti was put into operation on September 25, 2009. Its 300m concrete dam of double-curvature arch is the highest arch dam in the world now in progress. The height of excavated side slopes reaches nearly 700m, which have been clad with concrete to be unique in the world.