First Unit of Xueka Hydropower Station Begins Operation in Tibet

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The first unit of Xueka Hydropower Station, a key project in the state in Tibet, commenced its 72-hour trial operation on September 24.

The plant is the first key project in the state in Tibet in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006-10) and is located on the Ba River in Gongbo Gyamda County in eastern Tibet's Nyingchi Prefecture. The project is the sixth scheme planned in the river section downstream of the Basong Lake and is also a key project in the cascade development scheme in the Ba River Valley.

The Xueka Hydropower Station will be furnished with four vertical Francis turbine-generating units of 10 megawatts (MW), with a total investment of $105 million. The units will have a designed annual power output of 182 million kilowatt-hours. The project is a conventional diversion-type power station, and is mainly composed of the head structure, flood discharge structure, diversion structure and powerhouse. The project contains a 19.6-meter concrete dam with a total reservoir capacity of 860,000 cubic meters at the normal storage level of 3,346.5 meters above sea level.

Presently, the total installed capacity of the grid of the Nyingchi Prefecture is less than 20 MW. Official operation of the hydropower station will greatly improve power supply in the region.

Tibet, located at the so-called "third pole in the world", is rich in water resources, with over 200 gigawatts of theoretical reserves in hydropower resources. However, because of extremely bad climactic conditions, two-thirds of the counties in region remained "non-electricity areas" until the beginning of the 1980s. In order to solve the bottleneck in restricting the social and economic development of Tibet, The No.2 Hydropower Squadron of Chinese People's Armed Police Force has successfully built 17 hydropower projects with a total installed capacity of 331.1 MW since 1985, accounting for 67.85% of the total installed capacity in Tibet.

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