On October 16, the exhaust ventilation shaft of the Jingning Pumped Storage Power Station, constructed using China's first domestically developed 7-meter-diameter raise boring machine, was successfully completed.

The Jingning Pumped Storage Power Station is located in Jingning She Autonomous County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province. It is a key project of the national "14th Five-Year Plan" energy development plan and a key renewable energy development project of Zhejiang Province's "14th Five-Year Plan." The station is equipped with four reversible hydroelectric generating units with a unit capacity of 350 MW each, a total installed capacity of 1,400 MW, a rated head of 625 meters, and a designed annual power generation of 1.4 billion kWh.

The power station is invested in, controlled, and designed by East China Survey and Design Institute under Power Construction Corporation of China (PowerChina), supervised by Beijing Institute and Zhongnan Institute, and constructed by Sinohydro Bureau 7 and PowerChina Port and Waterway Company. Once completed, it will mainly undertake tasks such as peak shaving, valley filling, frequency regulation, phase modulation, and emergency reserve for the Zhejiang power grid. It will further drive high-quality development in local transportation, tourism, employment, and other fields, provide favorable opportunities for accelerating the development of new energy and tourism, and add momentum and energy storage for the future development of Jingning County and its surrounding areas.

The underground powerhouse exhaust ventilation shaft, constructed by Sinohydro Bureau 7, has a depth of 319.7 meters and a circular excavation section with a diameter of 7 meters. It was formed in a single raise-boring pass using a CTRBM7000E-0800 raise boring machine. This raise boring machine was specially developed for large-diameter, ultra-deep vertical shafts and is the first of its kind to be applied in China. Compared with the traditional shaft construction method of "pilot shaft first, then drill-and-blast expansion," the one-pass raise-boring technology for large-diameter ultra-deep vertical shafts eliminates the manual drilling and blasting process, responds to the national call for "mechanization replacing labor and automation reducing personnel," reduces noise and vibration impacts on the surrounding environment, decreases the number of construction personnel required, and eliminates the construction safety risks associated with personnel working underground.

The successful completion of the raise-bored exhaust ventilation shaft at the Jingning Pumped Storage Power Station not only breaks through the barriers of traditional drill-and-blast construction, but also provides important reference value for the subsequent application of domestic large-diameter raise boring machines in complex geological ultra-deep vertical shaft environments, filling the gap in China's ultra-large-diameter raise boring machines. The successful application of this equipment will further advance the mechanized construction process of pumped storage power station construction and inject new momentum into the transformation and upgrading of pumped storage power station construction management.