China's massive hydro energy storage goals may be getting bigger

China has been eyeing a major pumped hydro build-out since at least last year. - PIXABAY

BEIJING (Bloomberg): China’s biggest dam builder says the country is launching an even-larger-than-expected campaign to build hydro energy storage to complement renewable power.

The nation will start construction on more than 200 pumped hydro stations with a combined capacity of 270 gigawatts by 2025, Ding Yanzhang, chairman of Power Construction Corp of China, the country’s largest builder of such projects, said in a Monday (June 13) commentary in the Communist Party-run People’s Daily. That’s more than the capacity of all the power plants in Japan, and would be enough to meet about 23% of China’s peak demand.