YICHANG - The Three Gorges Power Plant, the country's largest hydropower project, generated 78.29 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2011, China Yangtze Power Co said in Yichang, central China's Hubei province on Saturday.

Affected by reduced water inflow, the total power generation volume was down 7.2 percent compared with that of 2010, the company said in a statement.

The Three Gorges Dam has seen water inflow quantities from the upper reaches of the Yangtze River during the flood season drop by about fifty percent compared with other years.

In spite of this, the project's operator adopted optimized measures to control the water level and generator unit in order to minimize adverse effects, the statement said.

The Three Gorges project is a multi-functional water control system, consisting of a 2,309-meter-long, 185-meter-high dam, a five-tier ship lock, and 26 hydropower turbo-generators.

Construction on the $22.5-billion Three Gorges project in the mid-section of the Yangtze River began in 1993 and finished in 2009. It started generating electricity in 2003.

Meanwhile, the Gezhouba Dam on the Yangtze River generated 16.26 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2011, a 0.14-percent year-on-year increase.

The Gezhouba Dam is located across the Yangtze River at the end of the Three Gorges, and 38 km away from the Three Gorges Dam on the upper reaches of the river.