Giant UHV cross-river power transmission project starts up

China's biggest ultra-high voltage, or UHV power transmission line and infrastructure project – spanning the Yangtze River, the longest waterway in the country – started operating on July 2.

Awesome: The mammoth 500-kV power transmission line spans the Yangtze, stretching from Taizhou to Wuxi cities. [Photo by Tang Dehong and Huang Weiwei]

It's a key project in the country's development plan for power during the 2016-2020 period and the sixth high-voltage transmission line to run through China's East Jiangsu province.

The 500-kilovolt power transmission project was approved in March 2020 and began construction in September of that year, with a total investment of over 1.5 billion yuan ($207.6 million).

The project's technical team overcame a series of technical difficulties and as a result set many industry benchmarks. The overall project and the equipment are 100 percent Chinese-made.

The transmission line spans 2,550 meters across the Yangtze, stretching from the cities of Taizhou to Wuxi in Jiangsu province, with a total length of 178 kilometers.

The project includes two power transmission towers – each 385 m high – which are the tallest of their kind in the world. It's estimated that the maximum annual power transmission can top 26 billion kilowatt-hours – the equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of a medium-sized Chinese city.

It is expected to increase Jiangsu's cross-river power transmission capacity by 30 percent. This will greatly promote the consumption of clean energy like offshore wind power in the Yangtze River Delta – and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 10 million metric tons every year.