China’s New Mega Bridges SHOCKED American Citizen – Take A Look: When it comes to mega-projects, many people associate them with the West. In fact, most Americans will claim they do everything bigger and better, including construction projects.
However, they will be left picking their jaws from the floor when they see the mega projects going on or just completed in China! In fact, in this video, we bring you insane projects that Americans won’t believe were just completed in China.
Most of you grew up with electricity generating stations that pollute the environment by releasing carbon emissions. However, the whole world is shifting to environmentally friendly renewable energy, and China is not to be left out!
As one of the nations at the forefront of clean energy, China has embraced wind energy in a big way and currently has the largest wind farm in operation, the Gansu Wind Farm, which is large enough to power a small country!
This onshore wind farm consists of 7,000 turbines, each taller than the Eiffel Tower. They produce a whopping 20 GW! Construction of the farm began in 2009 and was scheduled for completion in 2020 at the cost of around 17.5 billion dollars!
The farm is located in desert areas close to Jiuquan, in the northwest province of Gansu. The site was chosen because of the abundance of wind. In comparison, one of the largest onshore wind farms in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center, with a 1.5-gigawatt capacity. It is located in Tehachapi, California has 600 turbines.
When was the last time you passed through an airport and said, “wow, this airport is big”? Well, the largest airport in the world is located in China. It is known as the Daxing international airport or simply Beijing New Airport.
It is so big that it can handle 45 million visitors, and there is a plan to expand it to process 100 million visitors and four million tons of cargo annually! The gigantic Daxing airport, nicknamed “Starfish” because of its shape, has enormous dimensions.
It boasts a vast terminal building covering a 700,000-meter square area, while the ground transportation center extends to 80,000 meters square. The distance between the far end of the terminal to the center is 600 m! Construction began in 2014 and was completed in 2019, with the job progressing at a fast clip.
It is built on a 2,679.01 hectares or 6,620 acres site located 46 km south of Beijing’s popular political center, Tiananmen Square. It included the construction of airline bases, an intercity railway, a high-speed subway, a highway, and an air traffic control tower.
The airport has four civilian runways, and one for military uses. Beijing Daxing is the first airport globally with double-deck departure and arrival platforms.
The airport is also big in green energy, with lots of energy-saving features, including the use of natural light. Also, more than 10 percent of the power used in the airport comes from renewable sources.
On that note of renewable energy, we take you to the next mega-project, the Huanghe hydropower solar park generating 2.2 gigawatts of energy from the sun. It is second to the 2.3-gigawatt Bhadla farm located in India.
This Chinese solar farm covers more than 10,000 acres and started production in 2019. The Qinghai installation also includes 202.86 Megawatt-hours of energy storage capacity and is located in the desert near the city of Xining.
It is hooked to an 800-kV transmission line that runs 986 miles from Qinghai across that province and three others, Gansu, Shaanxi, and Henan. It will power cities far away in the east and south of China, including Shanghai and Beijing.
The solar farm, built in five phases, gulped 2.2 billion dollars. However, China spent a further 3.2 billion dollars on the transmission line. The solar farm generates power from over 7 million panels.
Before building the Qinghai farm, China’s largest solar plant was the Tengger Desert Solar Park in Ningxia province, producing 1.5 gigawatts. Meanwhile, in the US, the largest solar farm is the Solar Star, with 1.7 million panels.
It covers more than 13 square km in California and produces 579 megawatts, enough to light up about a quarter of a million homes. China is the land of bridges, and the next Chinese mega-project is the Beipanjian bridge which puts motorists literally in the cloud!
This bridge became the highest in the world when it opened, crossing the Beipanjian Grand Valley at a dizzying height of 1,854 feet above the Beipan River below.
The bridge was conceived to provide an easy way to traverse the mountains, high plateaus, rivers, and canyons of the Guizhou Province in southern China.
Actually, the three tallest bridges in the world are all located in the Guizhou province, but the Beipanjian bridge is more than 200 feet taller than the second tallest! The Duge Beipanjiang is a concrete cable-stayed bridge with four lanes connecting Xuanwei in the Yunnan Province and Liupanshui in Guizhou.
It cuts down travel time between the two cities from four hours to about an hour. The bridge deck is 1,854 feet about the water level, dwarfing the world-famous Golden Gate Bridge in California with a clearance of 220 feet!
It was a massive construction project, and although the designer didn’t set out to put such a tall bridge, they had to keep moving the final location of the bridge higher and higher to avoid caves and cracking in the karst mountains at either side of the valley.
The next Chinese mega-project takes us under the sea, where engineers are currently building a high-speed railway tunnel under the water in Jintang. The Chinese don’t like wasting time, especially when in transit, so if they must construct a tunnel under the sea to make their trains go faster, so be it!
This project is still under construction, but it is a massive undertaking. It is known as the Ningbo-Zhoushan Railway, China’s first high-speed rail with an undersea segment. It will link the Zhoushan Islands in East China’s Zhejiang province with the mainland upon completion.
Preparation for the technical proposal alone took two whole years, which is worth it as the undersea tunnel will become the longest in the world at 16 km. The whole Ningbo- Zhousahan railway is 77 km, but the undersea portion will stretch from Ningbo to Jintang.
The project is even more difficult than the 6.7 km section of the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macao Bridge because the undersea passage is a shield tunnel and goes deeper underwater. The project will cost China over four billion dollars and take six or seven years to complete.
With the high-speed trains zooming at 250 km per hour, passengers will be able to cross from Ningbo to Zhousan in just 30 minutes. China is the home of high-speed trains, and it is only proper to include the system as an entry on our list.
No fewer than 37,900 kilometers or 23,500 miles of lines crisscross the country, linking all of its major mega-city clusters, and all have been completed since 2008. Astonishingly, half of the rail tracks were completed in the last five years alone!
But the Asian country is not done, as it is aiming to double the current capacity by 2035! With maximum speeds of 350 km per hour or 217 miles per hour on many lines, intercity travel has been transformed, and airlines’ dominance has been broken on the busiest routes.
By 2020, more than three-quarters of Chinese cities with a population of 500,000 or more had a high-speed rail link. In comparison, the US has only one route that could be referred to as high-speed, the Amtrak North East Corridor, where Acela trains currently top out at 240 km per hour on expensively rebuilt sections of the existing line shared with commuter and freight trains!
The European country with the most extensive high-speed rail network in Spain, and it only has about 2,000 miles of tracks built for speeds above 250 miles per hour. Building high-speed railway tracks in a country as large and topologically diverse as China is a huge challenge.
From sometimes frozen Harbin in the far north to the near- tropical humidity of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis to the 1,776-km Lanzhou-Urumqi line traversing the Gobi Desert, China’s engineers have quickly developed extensive expertise in driving railways over, under, and through whatever terrain lies in their path.
For China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping, a high-speed rail is also a powerful tool for social cohesion, political influence, and the integration of disparate regions with distinct cultures into the mainstream. What is mind-boggling about these high-speed trains is the project’s scope, which will amaze most Americans.
For example, the 815 km long Zhengzhou East-Wangzhou line was completed in less than five years at the cost of 13.5 billion dollars! China is also interested in aliens, and it has built just the right tools to eavesdrop on them!
Many people are entertained by listening in on their neighbors, but most won’t go as far as building a 500-meter diameter dish to secretly follow conversations that don’t include them! But that is just what China has done with its massive FAST Radio Telescope!
The dish has become the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. FAST means Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. It’s built-in a natural depression in Guizhou, Southwest China. Among other things, its scientific goals are to study pulsars.
FAST already discovered two in August 2017. The complex dish is built in such a way that just a portion may be activated to focus on the receiver. FAST was completed in 2016, two decades after it was conceived as a project.
The total cost of the construction was about 170 million dollars. It is operated by the Chinese National Astronomical Observatory, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. However, China allows international researchers to use the facility, mirroring how other astronomical facilities are used worldwide.
So far, scientists from other countries have already used FAST. FAST’s surface is made of nearly 4500 individual panels. More than 2200 winches on the underside can shape the surface, forming a parabola aimed at different parts of the sky.
FAST is a significantly deeper dish than Arecibo, too, which gives it a wider field of view. Arecibo was the former world record holder until FAST was completed. Let’s hear what you think of China’s magnificent projects in the comments below!
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Information Source: Future Unity