The State Grid Corporation of China has announced the operation of the Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station, touted as the ‘world’s largest’.
The plant is located in Fengning County, Chengde City, Hebei Province and will ensure the Beijing Winter Olympics is green, according to the statement.
The project was started in 2013 and has 12 reversible pump-turbine generators, with each unit having a total generating capacity of 300,000KW.
The project has a capacity of 3,600 000KW, generates 6.612 billion KWh of energy capacity per annum and has an annual pumped power of 8.716 billion KWh.
The 12 units at Fengning have pumped capacity for 10.8 hours.
The project has 190 caverns, the largest underground factory in the world, and is the world’s first pumped-storage power station connected to the flexible DC grid, as a result of a connection made to the Zhangbeirou DC converter station.
Connection to the Zhangbei Rou DC grid and the North China 500 kV power grid will help ensure the Beijing Winter Olympics are powered with green electricity.
The plant will provide 600,000 KW of capacity to Beijing and Zhangjiakou, the host cities of the Winter Olympics.
The integration enables the plant to participate in load regulation and regional stability coordination and control.
The system is used for reliability and increased integration of solar and wind for resilience of the regional grid network.
The launch of the system comes as grid operators are exploring various forms of long-duration energy storage to leverage renewable energy as baseload power and to address the fluctuating nature of clean resources.
However, pumped storage is the most mature large-capacity energy storage method at present owing to functionalities such as large capacity, peak regulation, frequency regulation, phase regulation, energy storage, system backup and black start.
The plant is expected to avoid the use of 480,000 tons of standard coal and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2 million tons each year.
The project is one of the five pumped storage power stations that State Grid Corporation enacted in 2021.
