In December 2024, Rongke Power completed the world’s largest vanadium flow battery — a 175 MW / 700 MWh installation in Ushi, Xinjiang. Most trade coverage framed it as a bigger version of the Dalian project that came online in 2022. That framing misses the actual significance. Ushi is not Dalian-plus. It is a substantially harder engineering achievement in a harder location doing a harder grid job, and for any NZ buyer evaluating vanadium flow for utility-scale deployment, it is the project that should anchor the conversation.

If you are scoping a utility-scale battery energy storage system in NZ or the Pacific — for an industrial site, a grid-connected solar farm, an island microgrid, or a transmission-support installation — the Ushi reference matters because it answers a question Dalian could not: whether vanadium flow technology works at full grid-forming scale in genuinely demanding conditions. Here is what the project actually proves and why it changes the conversation.

The verified facts — what was actually built

Start with the project specifications, all confirmed by Rongke Power, Vanitec, energy-storage.news, and pv-magazine.

• Full project name: Xinhua Ushi Energy Storage Project (also referenced as Wushi in some Chinese-English transliterations).
• Location: Ushi, Xinjiang region, northwest China — a renewable-heavy region with extreme temperature swings, dust exposure, and limited urban infrastructure.
• Capacity: 175 MW power, 700 MWh energy storage. Four-hour discharge duration at full rated power.
• Completion date: 6 December 2024 announcement of completion, grid-connected by end of December 2024.
• Operational roles: grid formation, peak shaving, frequency regulation, renewable energy integration, and black-start capability for emergency grid restoration.
• Industry context: the project pushed Rongke Power’s cumulative global utility-scale VRFB fleet past 2 GWh — the largest installation capacity in the vanadium flow sector to date.

Why Dalian was the easier project

Before explaining what makes Ushi harder, it helps to understand what made Dalian achievable. The differences are not incidental.

• Dalian capacity: 100 MW / 400 MWh, commissioned in 2022. Originally planned as a 200 MW / 800 MWh installation in two phases, with Phase 2 not yet announced as commissioned.
• The home-territory advantage: Dalian is Rongke Power’s headquarters. Engineering staff, spare parts inventory, and R&D support all sit within commuting distance of the installation.
• The climate: Dalian has a comparatively mild coastal climate — humid continental but moderated by the Yellow Sea. Temperature swings are modest by Chinese inland standards.
• The duty cycle: Dalian operates primarily as peak-shaving and renewable-integration storage. Demanding, but not the same load as a grid-forming installation in a heavy renewables region.
• The grid context: Dalian sits within Liaoning’s relatively well-connected grid. Network support and conventional generation backup are available in ways that Xinjiang’s western edge cannot match.

What makes Ushi a harder problem

Now the comparison. Ushi was built in conditions that stress every assumption flow chemistry has been claimed to handle, and at 75 per cent greater capacity than Dalian.

• Remote location: Xinjiang sits more than 4,000 kilometres from Rongke’s Dalian headquarters. Engineering support, spare parts logistics, and operator training all had to be solved at distance, not commuted.
• Climate extremes: Xinjiang temperatures range from -30°C in winter to +40°C in summer, with substantial diurnal swings. Battery installations there face thermal stress profiles that mild-climate installations never encounter.
• Renewable-heavy grid: Xinjiang has some of China’s highest concentrations of wind and solar generation. The Ushi installation provides the grid-forming function those renewables need to integrate — a substantially more demanding role than passive peak-shaving.
• Grid-forming role: Ushi was specifically built as a grid-forming installation, not grid-following. This means it has to establish frequency and voltage references for surrounding generation — a far more sophisticated control task than just charging and discharging.
• 4-hour LDES at scale: 700 MWh at 4-hour duration is the kind of long-duration storage profile that lithium-ion struggles to match economically. Ushi is the deployed proof that vanadium can do it at utility scale.

What this proves for NZ and Pacific deployments

The reason Ushi matters for buyers thousands of kilometres away is what it removes from the risk register.

• Scalability is no longer a question: at 700 MWh, Ushi proves vanadium flow scales to utility levels without losing the chemistry’s intrinsic advantages — long life, non-flammability, deep cycling tolerance.
• Climate robustness is proven: if the chemistry holds up in Xinjiang’s -30°C to +40°C range, it will hold up in NZ’s far milder envelope (-19°C alpine to +39°C Canterbury) and across the Pacific’s tropical conditions.
• Grid-forming capability is operational: for NZ island microgrid and Pacific deployments where grid-forming control is essential, Ushi is the deployed precedent. The technology is no longer theoretical for that role.
• Manufacturer credibility is established: Rongke Power has now delivered over 2 GWh of utility-scale VRFB installations globally. For NZ procurement teams evaluating supplier risk, the operational fleet is meaningful.
• For utility-scale NZ deployments, our SPower Series is the containerised platform that brings Rongke’s Ushi-validated technology to NZ commercial and utility scales.

What is already on the horizon beyond Ushi

The Chinese vanadium flow pipeline already includes installations that will exceed Ushi within the next few years — and they matter for NZ buyers too.

• 250 MW / 1 GWh Chabuchar project: announced by China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group, also in Xinjiang.
• 200 MW / 1 GWh Jimusaer project: announced by China Three Gorges Corporation, also in Xinjiang.
• 500 MW / 2 GWh Xinhua Wushi hybrid: the first phase of which connected to the grid in November 2024 — combining lithium iron phosphate with vanadium flow at 250 MW / 1 GWh in Phase 2.
• 1.6 GW vanadium flow manufacturing complex: taking shape in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, backed by approximately CNY 11.5 billion (US$1.63 billion) investment.
• What this means for global supply: the manufacturing scale that will follow these deployments meaningfully reduces vanadium flow cost trajectories through the second half of this decade — relevant for any NZ project commissioning between 2027 and 2030.

Conclusion

Dalian demonstrated that vanadium flow could operate at the 100 MW class in a forgiving location. Ushi is the proof that the same chemistry scales to 175 MW in a much harder location, doing a much harder grid job — and that the manufacturer can deliver it. For NZ and Pacific buyers, the project removes three risks at once: scalability, climate robustness, and supplier delivery. The next wave of Chinese projects (Chabuchar, Jimusaer, Xinhua Wushi hybrid) will push the technology further and bring manufacturing costs down with them. The vanadium flow technology NZ buyers should evaluate in 2026 is not the same technology that existed when Dalian was commissioned in 2022. Ushi changed the conversation.

For a tailored briefing on how the Ushi-validated platform applies to a specific NZ or Pacific utility-scale project, the Zion Technologies team can provide a written summary within 48 hours.