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Three Gorges Dam

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Three Gorges Dam

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Also known as 3 Gorges Dam, Three Gorges

hydroelectric dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, China

OverviewAI-generated

The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric structure that began service in 2003. It stands 181 meters high and 115 meters wide, with a total length of 2335 meters. The facility operates at an elevation of 185 meters above sea level and maintains a hydraulic head of 80.6 meters.

The dam manages a watershed area of 1,000,000 square kilometers and has a discharge capacity of 116,000 cubic meters per second. It has a nominal power output of 22,500 megawatts and an annual energy output of 100,000 gigawatt-hours. The project operates with a capacity factor of 45.0 percent.

Synthesized by Vinony from 16 facts across 2 sources: Wikidata, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

~33 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Three Gorges Dam, officially known as Yangtze River Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project is a hydroelectric gravity dam that spans the Yangtze River near Sandouping in Yiling District, Yichang, Hubei province, central China, downstream of the Three Gorges. It is also the world's largest power station by installed capacity (22,500 MW); it generates 95±20 TWh of electricity per year on average, depending on the amount of precipitation in the river basin. After the monsoons of 2020, the dam produced nearly 112 TWh in a year, breaking the record of 103 TWh set by the Itaipu Dam in 2016.

The dam's body, 185 meters high and 2,309 meters wide, was completed in 2006. The power plant became fully operational in 2012, when the last of the 32 main water turbines in the underground plant began production. The last major component of the project, the ship lift, was completed in 2015.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Three Gorges Dam” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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