World News for Students of English

05-07-2021 07:00

The giant Baihetan hydropower plant in China opens for business. It is the world’s largest dam by unit capacity, and it’s located on the Yangtze River on the border between the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

The construction was one of China’s biggest and most challenging engineering projects, with a dam height of 289 meters, and it took only four years to build it. Provinces in eastern and central China with larger populations and more developed economies have been experiencing electricity shortages during peak demand periods.

The project is a part of a national plan to generate electricity and deliver it to high energy-consuming regions. It is also designed to strengthen control over water flows during the heavy summer flood season. Lastly, it is a part of Chinese efforts to curb increasing fossil fuel demand and bring about its goal of carbon neutrality.

Each unit of the hydroelectric plant is capable of producing 150 kilowatt-hours of electricity within a single rotation, which is the equivalent to the monthly electricity consumption of an ordinary family.

Difficult words: unit capacity (how much of something a utility can create), peak (at the highest level), curb (to keep under control), carbon neutrality (the state of balance between the carbon dioxide released and removed into and from the atmosphere).

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