The country’s demand for electricity will likely reach 1.5 billion kilowatts by 2020 based on its macro-economic growth target, said the general manager of State Grid, China’s largest electricity distributor in terms of assets, doubling the country’s current electricity consumption.
The booming demand would create a widening gap with the country’s power supply in the long term, although the current situation was mostly balanced, said Liu Zhenya. China’s power generation capacity was estimated to have reached 700 million kilowatts at the end of 2007, up from 600 million kilowatts at the end of 2006.
In August 2006, State Grid began building a pilot transmission line that will see 1,000 kilovolts of alternating current link southeastern parts of Shanxi Province with Jingmen City in the central province of Hubei. It will soon start building a second ultra-high voltage power line, a 800-kilovolt direct current line, running eastwards from the Xiangjia dam in Sichuan Province to Shanghai.
State Grid would also import electricity from neighboring Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, Liu said, to ease a potential domestic supply shortage. He said he expected the company to import a combined 120 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year from Russia and Mongolia by 2020.
<< Home