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China Begins Damming River for Second Largest Hydropower Plant Project

Posted on: Thursday, 8 November 2007, 09:00 CST

China begins damming river for second largest hydropower plant project

XILUODU, Sichuan -- China began damming the Jinsha River on Wednesday to build the Xiluodu hydropower plant, the second largest of its type next to only the massive Three Gorges Project.

The damming started at 9:30 a.m. and was expected to last 36 hours at Xiluodu where the river is 47 meters wide, said Wang Shukai, vice director of the project under the China Three Gorges Project Corporation.

Workers were preparing to drop more than 3,000 steel rebar boxes measuring about four cubic meters each and concrete blocks measuring 15 tons each into the river that was 20 meters wide as of 5:00 p.m.

The river's runoff at the site decreased to 592 cubic meter persecond, down from the 3,520 cubic meters per second before the damming started, as 83.2 percent of the water had been diverted and bypassed the dam via five channels that had been burrowed intomountains located upstream.

With a designed installed capacity of 12.6 million kilowatts, the Xiluodu plant will be the nation's second largest hydropower plant after the Three Gorges Plant. When completed, it will be thethird largest of its type in the world.

The plant located in the country's southwest will provide powerfor the dynamic economies of central and east China. It is also a subsidiary project to the Three Gorges Project in terms of flood control.

When complete, the dam will be 278 meters high with a reservoircontaining 11.57 billion cubic meters of water.

The project, being built with an investment of 50.34 billion yuan (6.76 billion U. S. dollars), started construction in 2005 and is expected to be operational in 2015. It will help increase the capacity of the Three Gorges plant and the Gezhouba plant by 379,200 kilowatts, and enable them to generate 1.88 billion kwh more power during the low-water season.

Jinsha River, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, flows between Yushu in Qinghai Province and Yibin in Sichuan Province. Xiluodu plant is the first major hydropower project on the Jinsha River that is seen as having excellent potential for hydropower resources.

China plans to build a dozen power plants, including the Xidukou plant, on the upper Yangtze stretch that is home to the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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