Huadian to Invest $708 Mln on Gas Power Project in Foshan

China Huadian Corp., one of the country’s largest state-owned power producers, will invest RMB 4.5 billion ($708.41 million) to build a gas-fired distributed power project in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) announced on Tuesday.

The Combined Cooling, Heat and Power (CCHP) co-generation project will have an installed capacity of one gigawatt (GW) and will be located in Foshan’s Sanshui district, according to the announcement.

The project is angling for gas supplies from the 2nd West-East Gas Pipeline, a Guangdong-based source with Huadian told Interfax on Wednesday, without providing further details.

Huadian put the country’s biggest gas-fired CCHP plant, the Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, into operation in 2009. The plant houses two 78-megawatt turbine units.

Guangdongplans to have 15 GW of gas-fired installed capacity by 2015, accounting for 14.6 percent of the province’s overall energy consumption. Some 3.4 GW of the 15 GW are pegged to be gas-fired CCHP projects.

Development of gas-fired distributed power projects should be encouraged in ‘load centers’ - areas with large numbers of end-consumers such as cities and industrial parks, Wu Yin, deputy director of the National Energy Administration, said in Beijing last week.

Chinaplans to build 1,000 gas-fired distributed power projects by 2015 and have installed capacity of 50 GW by 2020, Interfax previously reported. (Interfax, Edited by Topco)