From cave glimmers to city lights: northern Shaanxi’s first thermal power station powers the revolutionary base

According to Guozixiaoxin, 29 October 2026, a hand‑cranked generator weighing 68 kilograms was carried by troops across snow mountains and marshlands to northern Shaanxi during the Long March, transmitting revolutionary radio signals.

The machine was guarded by a 128‑strong detachment and operated by Xinhua News Agency staff after the Central Red Army reached Wuqi Town in October 1935, when Yan’an had no mains electricity supply. Workers from the Xiahuayuan power plant set out for Yan’an in 1946 with generating equipment, and their journey was reported by the New Chahar Journal.

Yan’an Power Plant, the first thermal power station in northern Shaanxi, was approved for construction in 1954 as a key national project in Shaanxi under the First Five‑Year Plan. Workers built the facility with basic tools and limited machinery, and it came into operation in 1956. Local residents stopped using sesame oil lamps for lighting, and the region gained its first local industrial power source. A 1,500‑kilowatt turbo‑generator unit was later added to the site. In the 1970s, young people from Beijing moved to the area to work on power production.

China Datang Corporation was established in 2002, bringing the Yan’an power works under its management. Older generating units, in service for 52 years, were shut down in 2008 under the national policy to replace small, inefficient power plants with larger, cleaner facilities. The enterprise expanded maintenance services and pressed ahead with a combined heat and power project.

Two 350‑megawatt supercritical air‑cooled combined heat and power units at the site started construction in 2015. In the same year, a recruitment scheme known locally as the “red recruitment” selected 50 descendants of revolutionary veterans to join the workforce, with candidates assessed under standards modelled on national college entrance examinations. A letter written collectively by these 50 staff members was published in People’s Daily on the opening day of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The group has run a volunteer programme called “red home visits”, calling on more than 90 households of revolutionary families over ten years.

The plant supplies heating for 1.12 million square metres of residential buildings across old and new urban districts of Yan’an, replacing 236 scattered small heating boilers. China Datang has developed photovoltaic and wind power projects in Luochuan, Yanchuan and Jiaxian. The thermal units use air‑cooling systems, enclosed coal yards, bag‑house dust collectors and limestone wet desulphurisation. A mixed energy system combining thermal, solar and wind generation is taking shape in the region.