China, the world’s largest investor in clean energy, has seen the rise of a solar panel “Great Wall” in a desert in the country’s northern region of Inner Mongolia, which not only provides clean energy, but also benefits the local environment and the economy.
Spanning the northern edge of the Kubuqi Desert in Dalad Banner, part of Ordos City in Inner Mongolia, the grand project is planned to extend about 400 kilometers with an average width of five kilometers and a capacity to provide clean electricity for over 300,000 people every year.
“Currently, the new energy projects in Dalad Banner have reached over three gigawatts. By the end 2025, we plan to add another 16 gigawatts of new energy capacity. This green electricity will be continuously transmitted hundreds of kilometers away to cities via 800-kilowatt and 1,000-kilowatt ultra-high-voltage power lines,” said Li Kai, director of the Energy Bureau Office in Dalad Banner.
Besides providing clean energy, the vast array of solar panels also serve as a first line of defense against desert sand blowing into the Yellow River, China’s second longest river that is about seven or eight kilometers away from the solar farm. This helps protect the river’s water quality and the communities that rely on it.
To date, the city has installed 5.42 million kilowatts of solar power on over 200,000 mu (about 13,333 hectares) of desert sand.
The Kubuqi Desert has expansive, open land perfect for solar farms and the region enjoys plentiful solar resources, with approximately 3,100 hours of sunshine each year.
The project spearheaded an innovative approach to combating desertification, with power generating solar panels placed on the top, allowing plants to grow on the ground and small livestock to graze under the panels.
The solar panels can reduce groundwater evaporation by 20 to 30 percent and provide shade and shelter from the wind, all of which support plant growth.
With plants and poultry thriving in the shade, this approach yields both economic and ecological benefits.
“During our construction process, we strive to preserve the original landscape as much as possible. Depending on the soil conditions, we introduce more resilient grasses and medicinal plants for cultivation. Under the solar panels, we integrate grazing and agriculture to boost economic benefits,” said Ao Xiaohu, head of engineering management at the Inner Mongolia Tongyang New Energy Company.
The vast solar panel array was made at a production base run by LONGi Green Energy Technology in east China’s Jiaxing Province with one of the world’s most advanced production facilities and cutting-edge manufacturing processes.
As a leading factory in the global photovoltaic industry, the base has enough capacity to generate a projected 385 gigawatts of power over a span of 25 years.
China builds photovoltaic “Great Wall” in northern desert
“The motivation for us to do this, part of it is we believe that automation, big data, digital… the cross section of a few technology trends… are going to fundamentally change how we manufacture and how we produce. One is the customer needs are becoming more differentiated. And the only way to achieve that is not by asking your workers to work harder. It’s actually using technology and digital to actually make some fundamental change to how we manufacture,” said LONGi’s vice president Zhang Haimeng.
At the factory, it takes just 16 to 18 seconds on average to produce a 2.58-square-meter solar panel, which can generate over half a kilowatt of power per hour and continuously generate energy and economic returns for 25 to 30 years.
China has made wind power and photovoltaic products more affordable and accessible to nearly 200 countries and regions around the world, exporting nearly 300 billion worth of these products so far and fast tracking the global green transition, Zhang said.
