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China’s Massive Hydro Energy Storage Goals May Be Getting Bigger

PowerChina says construction will soon start on 270 gigawatts of pumped hydro plants to complement renewable power. 

Water being released from the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze river in Hubei province. 

Water being released from the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze river in Hubei province. 

Photographer: AFP/Getty Images

Bloomberg News

China’s biggest dam builder says the country is launching an even-larger-than-expected campaign to build hydro energy storage to complement renewable power. 

The nation will start construction on more than 200 pumped hydro stations with a combined capacity of 270 gigawatts by 2025, Ding Yanzhang, chairman of Power Construction Corp. of China, the country’s largest builder of such projects, said in a Monday commentary in the Communist Party-run People’s Daily. That’s more than the capacity of all the power plants in Japan, and would be enough to meet about 23% of China’s peak demand.