How Many Solar Panels In The Largest Solar Power Plant In The World?

We’ve got a new largest solar power plant in the world. It was recently powered on in — well, guess where. I’ll just insert a picture of the solar farm here while you think about it.

That’s right — it’s in China. It’s a 3.5-gigawatt solar farm. About 10 years ago, I visited what was once the largest solar power plant. It had 100 megawatts of power capacity, and it was enormous. We rode around part of it on a 4-wheeler. 3.5 gigawatts is 3,500 megawatts. I can’t fathom it.

To make the scale of this even harder to comprehend, the power plant includes more than 5.26 million solar panels. Those are monocrystalline bifacial double-glass solar PV panels.

The Xinjiang Midong solar project, as it is called, covers 32,947 acres. It includes 129 miles of transmission lines.

“The developer is a state-owned outfit with wind and/or solar projects in 12 provinces, according to the organization’s website,” TCD writes.

The solar farm required 15.45 billion Chinese yuan (~$2.16 billion) of investment to build. The project was developed by a subsidiary of China Green Development Investment Group.

The Xinjiang Midong solar project is expected to produce about 6.09 billion kilowatt-hours (or 6.09 TWh) of electricity per year. Explaining how much that could power is probably pointless — they’re all just huge numbers that we can’t truly wrap our minds around — but for comparison, that’s about as much electricity as Cameroon or Armenia uses.

And to wrap things up, remember, that is a 3.5-gigawatt solar farm. China Green Development Investment Group plans to reach 20 gigawatts of solar capacity by the end of the year. Good luck to you, brothers and sisters.