Qinghai looks to emerge as green powerhouse

Construction of a major photovoltaic and wind base project in Qinghai province kicked off on Tuesday as part of the government's plan to build massive wind and solar power facilities in the country's Gobi Desert and other arid regions.

With a total installed capacity of 10.9 million kilowatts, the new energy project is part of China's recently launched large-scale wind power photovoltaic base project in desert areas that has a total installed capacity of 100 million kW.

This is part of China's efforts to make faster progress in planning and developing large wind power and photovoltaic bases in arid areas, President Xi Jinping said earlier while addressing the leaders' summit of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity via video link in Beijing earlier this month.

With a total investment of more than 65 billion yuan ($10.2 billion), the project is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The solar projects expect total installed capacity of 8 million kW and the wind projects have 2.5 million kW.The solar-thermal projects boast 400,000 kW.

An analyst said the construction of the project plays a key role in making Qinghai a major clean energy industry base in the country.

"Qinghai aims to become a clean energy center for China and is taking the lead in building the earliest phase of China's new wind-and-solar bases," said Wei Hanyang, a power market analyst at research firm BloombergNEF.

"The latest construction will help increase the clean energy portion in the nation's ultrahigh voltage transmission system and enable more replacements of fossil fuels in central provinces," Wei said.

It will also help facilitate the government's ambition of reaching more than 1,200 gigawatts of installed solar and wind capacity by 2030, he added.

According to Xie Xiaoping, president of Huanghe Hydropower Development Co Ltd, a subsidiary of State Power Investment Corp, the company is responsible for part of the Qinghai-Henan ultra-high-voltage direct current project-a 1,587-kilometer 800-kilovolt DC line to transmit renewable energy from the country's western parts to central parts.

The Qinghai DC project's capacity is the under 1 million kW. Its construction kicked off on Oct 15. It is likely to commence operations by the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), said State Power Investment.

The company said the project will take advantage of the massive desert areas and the hydro resources in the upstream reaches of the Yellow River, while fully tapping the potential of hydro, wind and solar resources in China's western regions.

The company is also constructing wind and solar power projects in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, including a solar project with an installed capacity of 4 million kW and a wind project with an installed capacity of 2.4 million kW.