According to Reuters, an unnamed “Chinese state-owned company” connected the world’s largest solar farm to northwestern Xinjiang’s grid on Monday.
The 200,000-acre solar farm situated in a desert area of the region’s capital, Ürümqi, will boast 5GW. The announcement came from the state asset regulator’s website, which quotes the Power Construction Corp of China.
The new facility will generate around 6.09KwH of electricity per annum, which would be enough to power Papua New Guinea for 12 months.
Xinjiang is sparsely populated and popular for solar and wind resources, which has prompted the region’s boom in renewable energy bases. These bases send a large amount of their power to China’s more densely populated areas, such as its eastern seaboard.
The world’s now second and third largest operational solar facilities are also in western China. These are the Longyuan Power Group’s Ningxia Tenggeli desert solar facility and the China Lüfa Qinghai New Energy’s Golmud Wutumeiren solar complex. The Global Energy Monitor’s solar power tracker reports that these projects both have a capacity of 3GW.
