China recently announced plans to build an eight-gigawatt solar farm, which will be the largest in the world when completed. According to Electrek, the solar farm will be part of a nearly $11 billion project that will consist of (mostly) clean energy installations, including wind power and solar thermal power.
The facility will be built in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China and is projected to come online by June 2027.
To put in perspective just how massive the output from this eight-gigawatt facility will be, it will be more than half the current solar output in the United Kingdom and capable of providing electricity to around 6 million homes, according to the Independent.
According to Electrek, state-owned power company China Three Gorges Renewables Group said that power from the project will be sent via an ultra-high-voltage transmission line to the highly populated Jing-Jin-Ji urban cluster, which consists of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei, and has a population of roughly 110 million people.
"Good for them," one reader commented. "I am happy to see so many small-scale solar projects going up in my small city, but I wish the U.S. would be a bit more aggressive with solar and battery projects."
The new eight-gigawatt facility will be nearly twice as big as the current largest solar farm in the world, a 3.5-gigawatt facility that came online in June, which also happens to be in China.
The continued growth in the use of clean energy will surely be a welcome development for the people of China, a country that has grappled with poor air quality in urban areas due to pollution largely caused by the use of dirty energy.
That's not to mention the impact China's increased use of clean energy will have on the world as a whole. As the second-most populated country in the world, per Statista, China obviously requires a lot of energy. Transitioning to clean sources of energy will greatly reduce the effect the nation's energy use will have on the warming of the planet.
"China's role is critical in reaching the global goal of tripling renewables," the International Energy Agency noted in a recent report, per the Independent, "because the country is expected to install more than half of the new capacity required globally by 2030."
Norwegian analyst DNV expects solar to overtake dirty energy as the largest single source of power in China in 2031, as reported by PVTech.
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