National Grid's Panxi UHV AC Project, a $23.2B Investment, to Span 994km and Complete by 2028

On March 31, the National Grid announced that the Shaanxi-Henan ± 800 kV UHV DC project, the final project of the "three exchanges and nine direct" projects in the National "14th Five-Year" plan, with a total investment of 19 billion yuan.It starts in Yulin, Shaanxi, and ends in Kaifeng, Henan, passing through Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan provinces. The total length of the line is 728 kilometers, the transmission capacity is 8 million kilowatts, and it is planned to be completed and put into operation in 2028.

This week, against the backdrop of fluctuating upward copper prices, the secondary copper industry chain showed a complex situation in which extremely tight upstream raw material supply coexisted with persistent negative margins for downstream finished products. In the secondary copper rod market, SMM data showed that the operating rate fell further to 5.45% this week, down 0.38 percentage points MoM and 25.43 percentage points YoY

Chile’s most pressing crisis at present is the issue of water resources. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest regions in the world and also the core area for copper and lithium ore extraction. The local area has experienced a drought for as long as 14 years, and reservoir storage has fallen to only about 30%. For miners, water resources are not a secondary issue, but an indispensable key production factor in such processes as ore processing, dust suppression, and equipment cooling. The decline in ore grade has further exacerbated the predicament