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XINING -- How long does it take to transmit electricity generated in northwest China's plateau province of Qinghai to the central Chinese province of Henan over 1,500 km away? According to Li Hongfeng, it just takes five milliseconds -- 0.005 seconds.
"The volume of electricity transmitted from Qinghai in a single second can meet the power demand of a household in Henan for two years," Li, who is a maintenance operator at the Qingnan converter station in Qinghai, told Xinhua.
He said that this rapid power transmission capability can be attributed to the installation of an 800-kilovolt ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission line.
"The speed of power transmission via the regular 330-kilovolt lines is comparable to a vehicle traveling on a county road, while our station is the gateway to a power expressway," Li said.
Situated in Gonghe County of the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai, the converter station is the starting point of the 1,587-km UHV transmission line, which ends in Zhumadian City in Henan, with the provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi in between.
As of July 25 this year, the line has delivered 81.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity since it went operational in 2020, according to real-time data displayed on a monitoring screen at the station.
"Notably, the electricity transmitted through the line is green power generated from solar, wind and water sources," Li said.
At full capacity, the line can deliver 40 billion kilowatt-hours of green electricity a year, which is equivalent to the amount of electricity produced from 18 million tonnes of coal, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 29.6 million tonnes, said Zhang Yanjun, deputy head of the station.
With an investment of 22.6 billion yuan (about 3.16 billion U.S. dollars), the line is part of a massive network China has built to transmit electricity from its resource-rich west to its more developed, electricity-thirsty east.
Serving power demand in other parts of the country, the project is representative of the thriving clean energy sector in Qinghai, which is home to the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers.
Over the years, the province has harnessed its rich water, solar and wind resources to boost its green power development, making it one of China's leading regions in the field.
Qinghai is the first province in China where new energy accounts for the majority of both its installed power capacity and its power generation, according to the State Grid Qinghai Electric Power Company.
Official data shows that in the first half of this year, 53.23 billion kilowatt-hours of green electricity were generated in Qinghai, accounting for nearly 90 percent of the province's total power output.
Just a few kilometers from the Qingnan converter station stretches a blue sea of photovoltaic panels. And beneath these solar arrays, flocks of sheep graze on lush grassland.
"These scenes demonstrate our commitment to realizing harmony between green power development and ecological protection," Li said.
ROBUST COMPUTING POWER
While aiming high with its clean electricity growth, Qinghai has also doubled down on its efforts to become a national leader in green computing development as surging numbers of AI applications have led to explosive growth in algorithm demand.
Industry insiders note that as the computing industry is power-intensive, high levels of energy consumption are still the main drawback of data centers.
The province enjoys multiple natural advantages in the development of its green computing sector, said Zhou Ji, a technician at the State Grid Qinghai Electric Power Company, noting that green computing relies on a steady supply of clean power.
According to company statistics, various types of data centers in Qinghai can achieve natural cooling for 314 days each year, as the province has an annual average temperature of just 3.4 degrees Celsius.
Thanks to its natural advantages and supportive policies, Qinghai has attracted a number of leading internet firms, including Alibaba, Baidu and China's three major telecom operators, fostering new business models such as intelligent computing and supercomputing.
To date, the province's computing power has exceeded 15,000 PFLOPS -- a 40-fold increase from early 2024. One PFLOP is equal to 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
According to the province's plan for the development of its green computing industry, it aims to foster a cluster of intelligent computing and supercomputing enterprises, and to establish a diversified power supply system for green computing by the end of 2025.
In the era of AI, computing power has become one of the most important productive forces, Zhou said, adding that he is optimistic about the development prospects of computing power in Qinghai.
