On December 26, 2024, the Huanghe Yangqu Hydropower Station—China's first embedded concrete face rockfill dam and the Yellow River Basin's first digital twin smart power plant, surveyed, designed, and constructed by the company—held a ceremony marking its full-capacity commercial operation at 1,200 MW.

The Huanghe Yangqu Hydropower Station is the lowest of the three planned cascade stations—Ciha, Banduo, and Yangqu—upstream of the Longyangxia Hydropower Station on the main stem of the Yellow River. The station is equipped with three 400 MW Francis turbine-generator units, with a total installed capacity of 1,200 MW, a total reservoir capacity of 1.793 billion cubic meters, and an average annual power generation of 4.732 billion kWh, enough to meet the annual electricity demand of about 1.58 million households. This is equivalent to saving about 1.467 million tons of standard coal and reducing 4.412 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, delivering significant economic and ecological benefits.

During project construction, the PowerChina team consistently adhered to the philosophy of "upholding integrity and innovation, empowering with science and technology." The design adopted an innovative dam type—China's first embedded concrete face rockfill dam—effectively enhancing dam safety performance as well as economic and environmental benefits. This has played a positive role in advancing the development and construction of the Ciha Gorge project and the development of 300-meter-class concrete face rockfill dams, filling a gap among dam types of its kind at home and abroad. The team actively promoted the application of basin-level digital twin technology at the Yangqu Hydropower Station, innovated the design architecture, optimized the technical system, and built a smart platform for full life-cycle management. Leveraging conventional hydropower stations such as Yangqu and Longyangxia, they planned and advanced a new model for clean energy development, taking the lead in carrying out planning research on "hydropower adjustment in the Longyangxia–Qinghai section of the Yellow River," "basin-wide renewable energy integration," and "clean energy bases in desert, gobi, and wasteland areas," achieving multi-energy complementarity and integrated development of "water, wind, solar, and storage," and providing a "Yellow River model for the new era" for the development of major river basins across the country. Next, the project team will, in accordance with the unified arrangements and deployment of Qinghai Province and the owner, make every effort to advance the preliminary survey and design work for projects such as the Ciha Gorge and Erduo hydropower stations, continue to provide high-quality and efficient technical services as always, and contribute wisdom and strength to building Qinghai Province into a highland for the clean energy industry.