Shanghai Qinkai Industrial Co., Ltd. said the 290 MW Bukhara project in Uzbekistan, which is scheduled for completion, is being handled entirely in-house from product design to factory delivery, with hot-dip galvanised (HDG) cable trays, racks and accessories in scope.
“On a project like this the specification is decided long before anyone stands on site,” the company said. “Galvanised steel is not a preference in a desert climate. It is the difference between a thirty-year structure and a maintenance programme.”
The project sits inside a national build-out rather than a merchant one. The World Bank Group noted in May 2024 that Uzbekistan’s government aims to scale up renewable generation by up to 25 GW, or 40 percent of national electricity consumption, by 2030, and inland sites of this size in Central Asia are being delivered against that programme.
What a desert site asks of a cable support system
A cable support system in this climate meets four conditions at once: intense ultraviolet radiation, wind-borne dust and sand, a hard continental temperature swing between day and night, and condensation that forms when clear skies cool surfaces faster than the surrounding air. None of them destroys steel quickly. All of them destroy paint.
That is the argument for hot-dip galvanising. A coating formed by dipping the finished part into molten zinc is metallurgically bonded to the steel rather than laid on top of it, and it covers the places a coated system fails first — edges, welds and the inside of hollow sections. Coating thickness is set by reference to a galvanising standard such as ISO 1461 or ASTM A123 and verified by measurement, batch by batch, rather than by looking at the finish and calling it even.
Two consequences follow at project scale. First, every cut edge and weld made after galvanising has to be treated to the same standard, which is an argument for minimising them in the first place. Second, the finish has to survive freight as well as weather, because a coating damaged in handling protects no better than a thin one.
The three items in the scope
Delivery into a landlocked country
The site is a long way from any seaport. That single fact changes the packing decision: long members will be transferred between modes more than once before they reach the array, and every transfer is an opportunity to bend a rack or damage a galvanised surface. Segmented packing, reinforced crates and a loading plan that follows the site’s installation sequence therefore carry more weight than they would on a coastal project.
The same distance changes what documentation is worth. A missing bracket discovered on site in Central Asia is not a phone call and a courier; it is a production slot, a freight booking and a schedule risk.
The final phase of a project is a records phase
A project scheduled for completion is entering the period when evidence matters more than material. As-built drawings have to match what was actually shipped, coating records have to be traceable to the parts they cover, inspection reports have to reconcile with packing lists, and spares have to be on site before the plant starts generating rather than after the first failure.
“The last month of a project is the month the paperwork has to hold,” the company said. “If a galvanising record or an as-built drawing is missing by then, it cannot be recreated — the steel is already installed.”
Post time: Sep-24-2026