China's First 2-Ton-Class Tethered Balloon Successfully Completes Trial Operation

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 21, China's first 2-ton-class tethered balloon successfully completed a trial operation in the Tibet section of the Tibet-Guangdong UHV DC transmission project. Without building roads or installing cableways, a large balloon 25 meters in diameter lifted 2 tons of transmission tower materials to a steep mountain ridge at an altitude of 4,000 meters. Construction in high-altitude, deep-mountain areas now has a "green aerial corridor."

A Giant Balloon Takes the Stage

Eight Stories Tall, Lifting 2 Tons of Engineering Materials

This test section of the Tibet-Guangdong UHV project is entirely located in remote, uninhabited deep-mountain areas above 4,000 meters in altitude. Most tower foundations are built on steep ridges inaccessible by road, making it the section with the highest altitude and the worst transportation conditions along the entire line. In the past, in such scenarios, traditional road construction was costly and damaging to the ecology, while cableway installation was difficult and subject to many restrictions. Material transportation had long been a core problem constraining construction progress.

The tethered balloon uses cables to connect the balloon to a ground control device, controlling the balloon's height and horizontal position by reeling the cables in and out, achieving point-to-point transfer of materials, and providing a completely new technical pathway for green material transportation in transmission projects.

At the construction site, a tethered balloon with a diameter of 25 meters, a volume of 8,000 cubic meters, and a height of about eight stories slowly ascended. Multiple tethers were reeled in and out in synchronization, and heavy construction materials were lifted off the ground, moving steadily along a predetermined route toward the mountain work site.

A New Aerial Corridor

More Environmentally Friendly, More Controllable, More Comprehensive

Tu Dejun, Director of the Transmission and Transformation Engineering Technology Research Institute at the State Grid Electric Power Engineering Research Institute, introduced that the team innovatively developed this tethered balloon transportation equipment, overcoming the challenges of attitude imbalance and trajectory deviation in strong wind environments. The balloon's movement is controlled through a ground tethering system, automatically grabbing and releasing transmission tower materials to complete material transfer.

Feng Tao, Project Manager of State Grid Henan Power Transmission and Transformation Company, stated that compared with traditional cableways, tethered balloons are more flexible to deploy, less dependent on terrain, and faster to relocate; compared with drones, they have greater load capacity and longer endurance. They are especially suitable for mountainous areas with large elevation differences, dense vegetation, or conditions unsuitable for cableway installation. They can also effectively reduce temporary facility and consumable investments and lower disturbance to the environment along the route.

In fact, this is just a microcosm of the development of low-altitude transportation equipment in China's power engineering. At present, for complex construction scenarios such as high-altitude and deep-mountain areas, China has gradually formed a low-altitude transportation technology system represented by heavy-lift drones, cargo airships, and tethered balloons, driving the continuous upgrading of power grid construction toward mechanization, intelligence, and unmanned operations.