Chinese state-owned utility Huanghe Hydropower Development has finished building the world’s second largest solar power project in a desert in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai. The project includes an energy storage system of 202.9 MW supplied by China-based Sungrow.
The project involved an investment of RMB15.04 billion ($2.2 billion) and includes 202.8 MW/MWh of storage capacity. The company announced the storage system as a solar+storage project in mid-May 2020.
Construction of the PV plant began in November 2019 and was completed in September 2020. The storage system was deployed within four months, from May to September. The installation will sell power to the local grid at a price of RMB0.34 per kWh. The project has been built with monocrystalline bifacial modules, supplied by an undisclosed manufacturer, and 900 MW of Sungrow’s SG250HX 1,500 V string inverters.
The complex is connected to an ultra-high voltage power line that State Grid Corp. of China is building to connect the far northwestern parts of the country to the more densely populated eastern provinces. The RMB22.6 billion power line project will include the construction of two converter stations with 8 GW of transmission capacity. The line will extend 1,587 km across Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi and Henan provinces.
