China’s Remote Deserts Are Hiding an Energy Revolution

Nations will be urged at COP28 to triple renewable energy capacity this decade. The world’s top polluter is already on track, propelled by President Xi Jinping’s strategy to use remote regions to host vast green projects.

By Bloomberg News

November 26, 2023, 7:00 PM EST

Out of the rolling yellow dunes of the Kubuqi desert arises what appears to be an oasis, shimmering blue beneath the northern China sky.

Row after row of hundreds of solar panels cover this otherwise barren stretch of Inner Mongolia, about 500 kilometers (311 miles) inland from Beijing. They’re the centerpiece of a clean energy project the size of 20 Central Parks that provides enough electricity for 1.1 million homes.

The mammoth site is just one small piece of President Xi Jinping’s plan to deliver the largest ever deployment of man-made power capacity. By the end of this decade, China aims to build the equivalent of 225 more of these massive renewables bases across vast swathes of the country’s interior.

It’s a campaign that promises an upheaval across the energy sector: curbing China’s demand for fossil fuels, trimming its reliance on energy imports and steering the world’s biggest polluter toward a feasible path to zero out its greenhouse gas emissions.

Once complete, the renewables bases will total 455 gigawatts of wind turbines and solar panels. That’s more clean energy generation capacity than is currently available in any nation outside China, and almost the size of the entire power network — including coal plants and nuclear reactors — in India, the world’s third-largest system.

“It’s mind-blowing,” said Cosimo Ries, a Shanghai-based energy analyst with Trivium China. “There’s nothing in history you can benchmark this against.”

Few details on China’s desert developments have been disclosed since Xi outlined his vision for the strategy in a 2021 speech. Now, work by Bloomberg News and analysts at BloombergNEF to visit sites, interview those involved and review thousands of pages of government documents and industry databases is offering the first major assessment of progress.

The analysis reveals a rollout of solar and wind that’s put China on track to reach records this year that far exceed its already world-beating adoption of green energy. So much clean power is coming online that the country could reach peak emissions well ahead of its 2030 deadline, giving the planet a better chance of keeping global temperatures in check.

It’s also a crucial example as COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber pushes more than 200 countries to use the United Nations climate summit opening in Dubai this week to commit to a tripling of renewable power generation this decade. Achieving the target is probably the most important action the world can take to hit net zero, according to the International Energy Agency.

China will lift renewables capacity to about 3.9 terawatts by 2030, more than three times the amount in 2022, BNEF said in a report last week. Al Jaber is urging attending nations in the UAE to aim to lift the global total to 11 terawatts.

Efforts to assess the desert strategy uncovered details of about 90 gigawatts of the planned 97 gigawatts being added in a first batch of projects, all of which are intended to be installed by the end of this year.

Source: Data compiled by BloombergNEF

Notes: Project status as of Nov. 2, 2023; Solar capacity is shown in alternating current able to be transmitted to the grid, which is how the Chinese government tends to measure solar projects.

As of early this month, about a third of capacity was completed and a further half was being built. The nation’s developers are known for end-of-year rushes to meet construction deadlines. One gigawatt is about the equivalent of capacity at a typical nuclear reactor.

For a small volume of capacity, there’s still no clear sign that work has begun, according to BNEF. Some projects that were rushed into planning after Xi’s announcement are now being challenged by local land use or environmental authorities, including a development in Inner Mongolia that’s been accused of damaging forests.

The speed at which projects are being deployed has already led several forecasters to upgrade their estimates for renewables adoption this year. China will install more than 300 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity in 2023, almost double the volume a year earlier, according to BNEF forecasts. The entire global total in 2022 was 338 gigawatts.

“China is relying on these large wind and solar bases to play a key role in its new energy system,” said Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

The initial batch of projects focuses heavily on China’s deserts, including the Gobi in the north and the Takla Makan in the west. Both have played a key role in the nation’s development, providing natural boundaries that protected the country from outside invaders and limited the landward expansion of its historical empires.

They also offer benefits for renewable energy: wide skies and open plains with China’s most consistent sunshine and steady winds. They’re sparsely populated too, making it far easier to construct large-scale projects.

And there’s an economic advantage. Land is cheap because there’s little competition for space with major agriculture or real estate development, and the vast scale of many developments can help lower costs. Those factors mean the desert bases will likely be among the cheapest sources of power in the world, according to Ries.

Source: Wang, Y., Chao, Q., Zhao, L. et al. Assessment of wind and photovoltaic power potential in China (2022)

That’s potentially crucial at a time when the world’s clean energy sector is coming under its most severe financial pressure in years, even as installations boom and with an estimated $1 billion a day being invested in solar alone.

Companies are being squeezed by volatile costs, high interest rates, and — particularly in China — fierce competition that’s driven down prices of clean energy technologies by almost 80% since 2010.

Constructing large-scale energy bases can help take advantage of China’s now mature clean energy industries, according to Liu Hanyuan, the billionaire founder of Tongwei Group, which owns one of the world’s largest solar firms. “They can support the country to accelerate its energy transition,” Liu said at a Chengdu conference this month. China “can even complete the process ahead of Western countries.”

China’s Remote Deserts Are Hiding an Energy Revolution

Deployments On Track

Transmitting Power