On August 11, major progress was made in the construction of the Qinghai Golmud Nanshankou Pumped Storage Power Station, currently the world's largest-capacity and largest-regulation-reservoir project under construction in a high-altitude region above 3,500 meters—the station's water supply project intake pump station was successfully commissioned with water flowing through it.

The Golmud Nanshankou Pumped Storage Power Station project involves a total investment of over 17 billion yuan. It is one of the key implementation projects of China's 14th Five-Year Plan, the first batch of approved pumped storage stations in Qinghai Province and the only approved one in Haixi Prefecture, and also the first pumped storage project approved for construction in a sandy-gobi desert area in Qinghai Province. With a designed capacity of 2.4 million kilowatts and annual power generation of 4.824 billion kilowatt-hours, it has become an important pillar for Qinghai in building a national clean energy industry highland. The construction undertaken by Sinohydro Bureau 14 includes the lower reservoir of the power station, the lower reservoir inlet/outlet and gate shafts, metal structure installation, on-site roads, traffic tunnels, and the construction, installation, and operation and maintenance of the water supply system.

Among these, the intake pump station is the "source" and first power unit of the power station's water supply system, undertaking the important task of safely and stably extracting raw water from the water source area. The project is located in the hinterland of the plateau, and its construction faces multiple challenges such as high-altitude hypoxia, extreme climate, complex geological conditions, and reduced performance of machinery and equipment. The project team of Sinohydro Bureau 14 organized scientifically and deployed meticulously, adopting innovative adaptive construction technologies and optimizing construction plans to overcome adverse factors such as plateau hypoxia, successfully achieving the project's safety, quality, and schedule goals and ensuring that the intake pump station was commissioned with water flowing through it as scheduled.

This successful water flow and commissioning not only provides a reliable water source guarantee for the efficient advancement and full-scale construction of the main works, but also lays a solid foundation for the power station's construction, marking a new breakthrough for China in the field of pumped storage on the plateau. Once completed, the project will undertake tasks such as energy storage, peak shaving, valley filling, frequency regulation, phase regulation, and emergency accident reserve for the power system. It can effectively promote the optimization and adjustment of the regional energy structure and the consumption of new energy, and has important practical significance for driving local social and economic development and supporting rural revitalization.