China Starts Building Its Largest Ever Solar Power Project
Earlier this week, the China Huaneng Group started building China’s largest ever solar power plant, a massive 166 Megawatt (MW) facility in the southern province of Yunnan.
The project, costing a total of 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion), is scheduled to commence operations in 2010. According to the China Electricity Council, the company intends to expand its capacity for solar, wind and other clean energy projects to an impressive 10,000 MW by the end of the same year.
China Huaneng, the nation’s largest electricity producer, has already teamed up with Hongkong Electric on a 470 million yuan, 48 MW wind farm in the same province.
It seems that the need for such large scale projects is now more pressing than ever, since China has recently overtaken the US to become the world’s largest producer of carbon emissions.
Image credit – OregonDOT via flickr.com on a Creative Commons license
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December 10th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I think this is great, I really hope the US will follow suit.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:03 am
I’m wondering what the overall opportunity is for solar energy in China. They need it desperately, as their current system of building coal-fired plants is the worst alternative possible.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I am wondering how far this meaningless contest could go. Especially bearing in mind that the larger the plant the greater the complexity, bureaucracy and risk. Additionally, economies of scale don’t apply as the main component (the panel) is the one that would be used in 1000 1kW projects. Finally, the infrastructure has to be state of the art to minimise transfer losses and load variability.
The future is in DECENTRALISED ENERGY.
Keep it simple people,
Thanks for reading.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:58 am
[...] and China have made some significant investments in renewable energy – setting up large scale solar and wind energy projects – but still lack a comprehensive nationwide plan to achieve emission [...]