Fuan Shares Supplies Cast Core Components for the Baihetan Hydropower Station Units—Harbin Electric Group Sends a Letter of Appreciation to Fuan

Fuan Shares Supplies Cast Core Components for the Baihetan Hydropower Station Units—Harbin Electric Group Sends a Letter of Appreciation to Fuan

On June 28, the first generating units of the Baihetan Hydropower Station on the Jinsha River were put into operation and began generating electricity. General Secretary Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message, praising the Baihetan Hydropower Station as “a major national project for implementing the strategy of transmitting power from west to east, and the largest hydropower project under construction in the world today in terms of scale and the most technically challenging. The world’s largest single-unit capacity—1 million kilowatts—hydraulic turbine-generator set represents a major breakthrough in China’s high-end equipment manufacturing.”

The Baihetan Hydropower Station is the world’s largest hydropower project in terms of single-unit capacity and the largest under construction. It is a key hydropower development and management project for the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, a backbone power source in the national energy strategy of “transmitting electricity from west to east,” and an important component of the Yangtze River flood-control system. The project is constructed and managed by China Three Gorges Corporation. With a total installed capacity of 16 million kilowatts, the station features 16 × 1-million-kilowatt hydroelectric generating units on both the left and right banks; the eight 1-million-kilowatt units on the right bank were developed by Harbin Electric Group, while the eight on the left bank were developed by Dongfang Electric Corporation.

In the innovation of this one-million-kilowatt generating unit, Harbin Electric Group has focused on two key aspects: the generator capacity has been increased from the original 800,000 kilowatts to the current 1 million kilowatts, and the turbine has adopted a mixed-blade runner design, enabling wide-load operation with high efficiency and stable performance.

As the “heart” of a hydropower unit, the runner is the most challenging component to develop and manufacture within an entire million-kilowatt generating set, often referred to as the “crown atop the Everest of hydropower.” The runner features a unique blade configuration comprising 15 long blades and 15 short blades—a so-called long–short blade arrangement. For the Baihetan project, the runner underwent more than 100 manufacturing processes to transform this massive structure—8.87 meters in diameter, 3.79 meters in height, and weighing a total of 338 tons—into the project’s most dazzling “pearl.”

Fuan Shares has undertaken the research, development, and manufacturing of cast steel components—including turbine runner blades of varying lengths, lower rings, and thrust heads—for the Baihetan unit at Harbin Electric Group. Leveraging years of technical expertise gained from projects such as Xiluodu, Xiangjiaba, and Wudongde Hydropower Stations, Fuan’s R&D and manufacturing team has successfully developed these components through innovative manufacturing processes, including visualized process design, boxless molding, vacuum refining, and CNC machining of flow surfaces.

As a major supplier of critical castings for hydro-turbine units, Fuan Shares has, since 2017, manufactured a total of 4 sets of long and short blades and lower rings, as well as 8 sets of thrust heads, seal rings, foundation plates, and conical supports for the Baihetan Hydropower Station, amounting to 420 individual castings with a combined weight of approximately 2,285.78 metric tons. These components have now been progressively installed and entered the commissioning and operation phase.

Fuan Shares is deeply honored to participate in the manufacture of the 1-million-kilowatt-class hydropower units at the Baihetan Project and takes great pride in contributing to the development of this critical national infrastructure.