Germany-based Voith has announced that the first of its three Francis turbine-generators, which has an installed capacity of around 784MW, has entered into service at Xiluodu hydropower plant in China.
Each of the three Francis turbine-generators weigh 1,350 tons, feature air-cooled generator with a rated capacity of around 855.6MVA, a generator rotor with a diameter of 13.7 and a height of four meters, the company said.
Commenting on the project, Voith Hydro Management Board chairman Roland Münch said that the commissioning of the first turbine generator is a key step towards the first one-gigawatt unit.
According to Münch, Voith met the high test standard in China without any errors and that the machines are running with high precision.
When completely operational, the Xiluodu hydropower plant will have an anticipated generation capacity of around 13.86MW. The plant will have around 18 machine units in total.
This hydropower project is expected to generated clean electricity, by lowering 150 million tons of CO2, 480,000 tons of nitrogen dioxide and 850,000 tons of sulphur dioxide annually.
China, which is one of the largest hydropower markets, currently has hydropower plants with a cumulative capacity of 250GW.