Energy-thirsty China, already involved in the world's largest hydropower project, will block a river in the southwest for a 24.3 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion) power plant, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The Longtan power plant, the largest in the country after the Three Gorges Dam, would have installed capacity of 4,200 megawatts, the agency said.
Workers would stem the mighty Hongshui river in the southwestern province of Guangxi early in November, it said.
"The blocking will be a milestone, marking the turning point from the basic digging period to dam-building period," Xinhua quoted Long Xianjin, deputy general manager of the Longtan Hydropower Development Co, as saying.
Some 6,000 residents in the dam area would be relocated, it said.
China's surging economy is gasping for electricity. Consumption has been growing at about 16 percent annually, but blackouts have plagued more than half China's provinces this year.
Engineers blocked the Yangtze at the Three Gorges Dam in June, starting to fill the reservoir for the US$25 billion project that is a point of national pride but which critics fear will become an environmental nightmare.
The project began in 1993 and is expected to be completed by 2009.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day