How China's giant solar farms are transforming world energyFly over "Datong County”, a region in northern China, and you’ll see two giant pandas. One is waving at you. They are made of thousands of solar panels.To get more china energy news, you can visit shine news official website.
Together, and with the other adjacent panels included, they form a 100-megawatt farm covering 248 acres. It’s actually a relatively small solar park by China’s standards – but it is certainly patriotic."It is designed and built as the image of the Chinese national treasure – the giant panda,” explains a document from Panda Green Energy, the company that constructed the farm.China has more solar energy capacity than any other country in the world, at a gargantuan 130 gigawatts. If it were all generating electricity at once, it could power the whole of the UK several times over. China is home to many sizeable solar farms – including the huge 850-megawatt Longyangxia Dam facility on the Tibetan Plateau,
with its four million panels. And the largest solar plant in the world at the moment is in China’s Tengger Desert – its capacity exceeds 1,500 megawatts.These projects have cost many millions of dollars to build – but have they been worth it? And will enough of these sprawling farms ever be constructed to meet its green energy targets?China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panel technology, points out Yvonne Liu at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a market research firm. "The market is really big,” she says. "It is like industrial policy for the government.” According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) more than 60% of the world’s solar panels are made in China.
The government has a clear economic interest, then, in ensuring that there is high demand for solar panels.Plus, by increasing the renewable energy resource, authorities can allow themselves a pat on the back. Cleaning up the Chinese energy mix is a key policy objective. Roughly two thirds of the country’s electricity still comes from burning coal.It’s no wonder that the vast, sun-drenched plains of north and north-western China have become home to huge solar farms.
There’s lots of space there to build them and the solar resource is reasonably reliable. Their construction has also been moving at a blistering pace. The IEA notes that China met its own 2020 target for solar energy capacity additions three years early.There may be another incentive behind China’s drive to build solar farms in some politically sensitive regions. In recent decades, many have observed that China has been keen to encourage infrastructure investment in and around Tibet – an autonomous region that is home to many who reject China’s claim on the territory.
Some argue that such investment is politically motivated in part – an effort to cement Chinese authority and support ethnic Chinese who have moved to these areas.One extraordinary venture uses solar panels to heat an underground grid designed to melt permafrost, so that trees will grow on the reclaimed land. It is reportedly an attempt to make the area more appealing to Chinese settlers.But building gigantic solar farms in the middle of nowhere has its downsides. To understand why, we need to look at China from above once more. In 1935 geographer Hu Huanyong famously drew what is known as the "Hu Line” from north-east to south-central China. It divides the country into two roughly equal portions. Less equal is the population distribution. The vast majority of China’s people, 94%, live in the eastern portion. The remaining 6% live to the west.

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