3 September 2008 - China Huaneng Group, one of the country's five biggest power generation companies, is working on a 3.6 GW coal fired power station in the northern region of Inner Mongolia along with several other companies.

The plant in Hulunbeier, or Hulun Buir, in the coal-rich region has commenced construction. It is predicted to start operation of three units in 2009 and another three in 2010, disclosed an official with the Hulunbeier branch of the National Development and Reform Commission.

As planned, Huaneng Group will be responsible for construction of two 600 MW units, while Beijing Deyuan Investment will take charge of two more, and so will Beijing Guohua Electric Power under the wing of China Shenhua Energy.

The whole project will have a total investment of 16.399bn yuan ($2.39bn), including 11.166bn yuan in power plants and 5.233bn yuan in supporting coal mining operations.

The units are designed to generate electricity of approximately 21.6bn kW a year. They will send all its electricity to Shenyang, capital of the northeastern province of Liaoning via a 500 kV direct current power transmission line, which will extend as long as 965 km and cost 6.451bn yuan.

The Hulunbeier branch of Huaneng Group is also building a thermal power plant in Manzhouli in northern Hulunbeier along with Shenzhen Energy Group Co with a total investment of 2.1bn yuan.

The 400 MW plant is scheduled to start to run the first generation set in September 2009 and the second set three months later. At present, its main bodies, such as boiler rooms, electric dust catcher infrastructure, cooling towers, are under construction.

It will build two homemade 200 MW coal fired direct air-cooling heat & power combined-production generation sets, which need water of about 2.1m cubic meters and coal of around 1.8m tonnes each year.

Moreover, it will install a flue gas desulfurization (FGD) unit and associated heat supply network. After completed, it will generate electricity of 2bn kWh.