#4k #China #hydropower #infrastructure #project Why does the southwest region of China have so many mega hydropower stations? How did we manage to build all these colossal structures here? And how do they contribute to our daily lives?
I quite enjoy this video and will approach it as an idiot. The Jinsha River is just the upstream of Yangtze River. In Wikipedia Yangtze river is 6,300km long and an average flow of 30,000m3/s with the upstream elevation 5,170m above sea level. Thus in every second 30,000m3 of water will drop vertically down by 5,170m. The available energy in watt is defined as density (kg/m3) x acceleration due to gravity (m/s/s) x flow (m3/s) and head (m). Since density of water is 1000kg/m3, acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s/s/, flow is 30,000m3/s and the available head or vertical drop is 5,170m the theoretical power available is therefore 1000 x 9,81 x 30,000 x 5,170 = 1,521,531,000,000 watt or 1,521,531 MW Since the Three Gorges has 22,500MW installed power and the 4 step hydros have a combined output twice of Three Gorges so only 67,500MW out of the 1,521,531 or less than 5% has been realised. In practise the geographical constraints can easily make possibly half of the theoretical power impossible to realise with the remaining half economically too expensive to engineer. Thus about 1/4 of the theoretical power or 380,000MW could be tapped. According to the literature published in 2017 there were already 107 large hydro stations in the Yangtze basin with an installed total capacity of 190,000MW. In 2017 Baihetan, Wudongde and possibly part of Xiluodu were not in commercial operation so the total installed hydro power output today in Yangtze may be around 200,000MW. The scope of increasing more large scale hydro in Yangtze is now limited. Already China is looking at Yarlung Tsangpo River for the next large hydro systems. Yangtze River remains the world's most productive river supporting the world's biggest No.1 hydro Three Gorges 三峡 (22,500MW), 2nd largest Baihetan 白鶴灘 (16,000MW), 4th largest Xiluodu 溪洛渡(13,860MW), 7th largest Wudongde 乌东德 (10,200MW) and the 10th largest Xiangjiaba 向家壩 (6,448MW)
I think you're wrong in this expectation.Because you count flow of Yangtze river is the same amount the flow on Jinsha river which is wrong. Yangtze flow is total flow of all its tributiary accumulated. Jinsha is only one of them. So the total electric capacity on your quoted are wrong.
@@alexlo7708 It is meant to be the first approximation. Downstream of a riven has the benefit of precipitation while the upstream has a lot less. The flow used was the average of Yangtze.
Not only precipitation. There are tributaries flow into the main stream of Yangtze river, which add considerable amont flow. So the flow of Jinsha river cannot be approximated to that of Yangtze river. In fact, many tributaries have larger flow than Jinsha river.
