Jolts, Volts and High Wire Acts

(Beijing) – The global power industry's sexiest scheme ever for transmitting electricity from power plant to wall socket has been a colossal failure, or a huge success, depending on who you ask.

The mighty row of steel towers and wires stretching 653 kilometers across China's heartland was designed to deliver a metropolis-jolting capacity of 5 million kilowatts. But since the special power line's switch was flipped in January 2009, it's handled no more than 2.83 million kilowatts, and for no more than two seconds.

Building the ultra-high voltage, alternating current (UHVAC) transmission line from Shanxi Province to Hubei Province, through Henan Province, took three years and cost more than 5 billion yuan. It's been dubbed a demonstration pilot project whose designer, builder and operator State Grid Corp. – the country's largest state-run power distributor – hopes to expand nationwide.