Three Gorges dam

However, the situation has changed dramatically since then, and concern has replaced delight among project builders. Top officials at the Yangtze Power Company and its parent corporation, the Three Gorges Project Development Corp., are now worried about how they will offload all the electricity produced by the dam. Li Yongan, general manager of the Three Gorges Corp., and Bi Yaxiong, vice general manager of the Three Gorges Corp. and general manager of Yangtze Power Co., travelled to Beijing on Nov. 11 [2005] to visit the State Grid Corporation. Mr. Bi told Liu Zhenya, general manager of the State Grid Corp.: “We’re here to find ways to sell Three Gorges power, and what we really want is a long-term contract with the State Grid Corp. for the duration of the 11th Five-Year Plan [2006-2010].” Mr. Liu of the State Grid Corp. observed that absorbing all the electricity from the Three Gorges project had become a major issue, with 70 million kilowatts of generating capacity coming onstream in China [in 2005] and more than 80 million kW set to follow in each of 2006 and 2007. There are risks in China’s power market, he said, but the State Grid Corp. would do its best to help the Three Gorges Corp. address its electricity-sale concerns. The Three Gorges project has a designed generating capacity of 18.2 million kilowatts, half of which has already been installed and put into operation. All generators on the left riverbank are now up and running, while generators on the right riverbank will be producing electricity as early as 2007. Work is also well under way on construction of the underground power station at the dam, which will house an additional six generators. The Three Gorges project is expected to produce a total of 360 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2006-2010, exceeding projections by 45.8 billion kWh. According to an official at the State Electricity Regulatory Commission, the point at which the power shortage in China began to give way to oversupply occurred as early as 2005. He said that while about 25 provinces had suffered a shortage of power in 2005, only a few had experienced the problem the previous year.<a href="#³“>³ And even in the provinces that were still affected, the situation had improved dramatically, with blackouts only occurring in peak periods of high demand. The SERC official predicts that power oversupply is likely to surface in parts of China as early as 2006, and occur throughout the country in 2007. “Central China could be most affected by the problem,” he says. In Hubei province, where the Three Gorges project is located, power supply and demand is expected to be balanced in 2007. But from then on, Hubei is likely to produce a surplus as more power plants come onstream. Yuan Gangming, director of the Macroeconomic Division of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, conducted fieldwork in Sichuan province a couple of months ago. He discovered that “electricity supply now exceeds demand in many parts of Sichuan as new power plants go into operation, which leads to drop in the price of