AFTER two years of construction, the 3.2 billion yuan Qingdao Converter Station has been completed and equipment was being installed ready for opening next month.

    After the country’s biggest converter station opened, about 4 million kilowatts of electricity would be relayed from Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to several substations in Laoshan, Jiaonan and Pingdi in Qingdao each year to ensure power supplies for Qingdao for at least 15 years.

    Located in Fujia Village in Xiaozhou, the converter station occupies more than 200,000 square meters with 10 60-meter terminal towers.

    The converter station would play a crucial role in relaying electric power from northwest China to Qingdao and even the whole Shandong Province, said Zhang Yutian, construction director from the State Grid Corp. of China. The installation of equipment was already finished and would start trials next month. When construction was finished in 2011, it would be capable of relaying about 4 million kilowatts a year, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total supply in Shandong Province.

    “It was like building four 1 million kilowatt electric power plants without any pollution discharge,” Zhang said. No power plant could yet supply more than 100 million kilowatts of power a year in the province and it would cost three times more to build four on the same scale, Zhang said.

    The power would be relayed to cities in Shandong Province through substations in Pingdu, Jiaonan and Laoshan in Qingdao. (Wang Yuanyuan, Wang Liyan)