On Dec. 29th of 2015, a 110 kilovolt transmission line engineering was brought into service in Biru County located in the Nagchu Prefecture of Tibet, marking achievement of a target task: extending main power grid coverage to 58 counties within the 12th Five-Year Plan period; with this the Tibetan plateau has formally entered the “power grid age”.

Due to the harsh natural conditions as well as frail economic foundations, Tibet’s main power grid has not offered coverage for all of the remote farming and pastoral areas. According to statistics, up until the end of 2011, there were 40% administrative villages and 520,000 farmers and herders that remained part of the no-electricity population.

In order to expedite power construction in the farming and pastoral areas the Tibet Utilities Electric Co., Ltd. of the State Grid Corporation of China invested over 9 billion RMB to carry out renovation and upgrade projects for rural power grids as well as the power construction project for no-electricity areas within the 12th Five-Year Plan period. This has provided solutions for power consumption problems pertaining to 120,000 households involving 470,000 people, highly improving the production as well as the household consumption conditions throughout farming and pastoral areas.

Data indicates that, in the past five years, Tibet has erected 110 kilovolt rural power grids as well as 18,000-kilometers of electric transmission lines; constructed 40 110-kilovolt transformer substations thereby increasing power transformation capacity to 1,390,000 kilovolt ampere; constructed 147 35-kilovolt transformer substations there by appending power transformation capacity to 330,000 kilovolt ampere.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan, Tibet’s power grid construction investment scale, based on that of the 12th Five-Year Plan, will be doubled, working hard to speed up the construction of synchronous power networks in Sichuan, Chongqing and Southern Tibet. During this period, the power network that is mostly of a 500 kilovolt level will be erected. Tibet’s unified power grid will be coordinated and developed from all levels, realizing power networking for areas throughout Central Tibet, Qamdo and Ali.

At the same time, the areas covered with the main power grid will be expanded, from 58 counties at present to 74 counties as well as the main townships and towns, basically settling the household power consumption problems in all the urban and all the rural areas in Tibet.