China draws green energy from infamous ‘sea of death’

Chinese construction crews have completed encircling the Tarim Basin – one of the most forbidding places on Earth – with an extra-high voltage “energy ring”.

The project, which has taken 15 years to build, transforms the vast inland basin – home to China’s largest desert – into a massive new-energy transmission hub.

The 4,197km (2,608-mile) power transmission and transformation project in an area of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region known as the “sea of death” was completed on Sunday, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The final section of the 750-kilovolt loop – now the largest power grid loop in China – was completed at the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert and is expected to go online in November, marking a major infrastructure milestone for south Xinjiang.

The infrastructure includes nearly 10,000 transmission towers along with nine substations that will collect wind, solar, thermal and hydropower, transforming the voltage before sending the electricity back out for consumption, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The extended power grid covers an area of 1.06 million sq km (409,268 square miles) and five prefectures in Xinjiang. According to Xinhua, most of the construction was completed along the Taklamakan Desert, which accounts for around 60 per cent of the Tarim Basin’s total area.

South China Morning Post