Recently, the Southwest region's first ultra-high-voltage (UHV) AC project designed in part by the Central China Power Engineering Institute (HuaZhong Institute)—the Sichuan-Chongqing 1,000 kV UHV AC project—was successfully completed and put into operation.

The Sichuan-Chongqing 1,000 kV UHV AC project is the starting project for connecting the power load centers of Sichuan and Chongqing and building the Southwest UHV AC backbone grid. It is a national key project of the 14th Five-Year Plan responding to the country's requirement to enhance ultra-long-distance power transmission capacity, and it is also China's first high-altitude UHV AC project, with a total investment of 28.631 billion yuan. After the project is put into operation, the voltage level of the main grid of the Southwest power grid will be raised from 500 kV to 1,000 kV, and it can transmit 35 billion kWh of clean electricity annually from western Sichuan and other areas to the load centers of Sichuan and Chongqing, equivalent to the annual household electricity consumption of nearly 10 million households. It is of great significance for ensuring safe and reliable power supply in the Southwest this winter and next spring and in the future, enhancing the power export capacity of western Sichuan, driving upstream and downstream industries, and serving the high-quality development of the local economy and society.

The Central China Power Engineering Institute undertook the design Package B task for the Tongliang 1,000 kV substation of this project, covering the main transformer area, the 500 kV power distribution equipment area, the 110 kV power distribution equipment and reactive power compensation area, etc. After the project was launched, the Institute attached great importance to it, selected design elites with rich experience and outstanding capabilities from various disciplines to form a project team, made every effort to guarantee design and service quality, carefully planned the project schedule, proactively coordinated with construction and owner units, overcame difficulties such as complex geological conditions, compact station layout, and variable equipment forms, and repeatedly refined the design scheme, achieving a reasonable, coordinated and aesthetically pleasing layout of all buildings, structures and process equipment in the station, which won unanimous praise from the owner and participating units.

In recent years, the Central China Power Engineering Institute has actively responded to the requirements of Power Construction Corporation of China (POWERCHINA), focused on core fields such as energy, cities, water and digitalization, actively participated in urban infrastructure construction, shouldered the responsibility for energy construction, and made positive contributions to improving the backbone grid, building a new-type power system, and promoting the green and low-carbon energy transition.