The Changji–Guquan ultra-high-voltage link is commissioned
State Grid Corporation of China commissions the plus-and-minus 1,100 kilovolt direct-current link from Xinjiang to Anhui, at the time the highest transmission voltage and the longest link of its class in operation anywhere. It is the physical answer to a geographic problem — generation in the north-west, load in the east — and it is included in this Journey as the counter-example to the grid bottleneck: transmission at continental scale is not technically blocked, and the countries where it moves slowly are the ones where permitting, land rights and the number of parties who must agree are the binding constraint rather than engineering.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Changji–Guquan ±1100 kV UHVDC link · infrastructure · China · not located
- Transmission and grid interconnection · infrastructure · global · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions
Supports the finding that grid investment and permitting, rather than generation cost, has become a binding constraint on deployment, including the estimate that on the order of eighty million kilometres of grid must be added or refurbished by 2040 and that over a terawatt of projects sit in advanced-stage interconnection queues. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; both figures are stated from author knowledge of the report and are flagged as unchecked on the citing object.
International Energy Agency, Paris · 2023-10 · Partly verified
IEA special report, Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions, October 2023