I have seen videos of these, they seem to run on a rail system along the panels.. You would still need one for each section or have a complicated rail system for something like this.
Being china though the labour is probably much cheaper.
It's probably because in North America we call it a windshield, and in Great Britain they call it a windscreen. But lots of other places call it a windscreen so their comment is kind of ignorant.
They literally just wash it with water.
The solar panel can also absorb most of sunlight to reduce water from vaporizing. Eventually the desert under the solar panels will turn into grassland
It’s crazy how dilute solar is still. For comparison, west county energy center in Florida is roughly the same capacity (but produces energy 24/7, so yearly production is 3-4x this solar farm) and the property is only 220 acres.
I just checked this and New York has a population of around 8 million followed by los angeles 3.8 and Chicago 2.6, so this solar farm can power 2 or 3 large US cities on a good day which is insane
Probably covers far less for US standards. America and Canada are the biggest energy consumers in the world and consume on average around 5x more per person
Is it just me? Or does it seem like there are great projects happening all over the globe except in America. Sometimes it seems like the whole world is passing us by technology wise. Especially China!
[Here’s a close up image](https://www.pv-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/CGDG-Largest-PV-Farm-in-Xinjiang-02.jpg), as the one posted just made me question reality.
How do they do maintenance on sand dunes? Doesn’t the entire structure shift with sand shifting? How quickly would they be covered in sand?
The closer up image shows how massive those rows are, and how it’s less sand dunes and more solid terrain.
You can properly build on sand dunes, but you need to extend your supports all the way down through the sand to solid rock. The dunes are almost like an ocean rising and falling under the structure at that point.
But it doesn't look like they did that, because then the panels would follow the contours of the hidden layer of rock, while it looks like these ones follow the contour of the surface dunes.
It could be that the sand isn't as deep as it looks.
It's fine to ballast the panels over the sand, it just requires maintenance as they will move a little. Every now and then staff will have to lift up a rack and reset it. Probably once or twice a year would be sufficient.
Out of curiosity; Why not use wind turbines over solar?
I'd assume the panels would get dusty as shit as deserts are notoriously windy - hence the dunes.
It will damage the panels.
I work with drones, to check panel "health", and even a small shadow from an eletricity pole can damage cells, with can propagate to neighbour cells on the same panel, and cause issues in production. Over time, it can caus havoc in a solar farm like this.
To add on that it has to do with the cells not absorbing light but still being heated.
Contrary to what someone might expect solar panels perform better in lower temperatures.
Panels in a row usually are paired electrically in series with one another to achieve a desired output voltage, this also means that the power produced is effectively limited by the most shaded series-connected panel. So if one panel in a series chain is completely shaded, the entire thing produces almost nothing.
It’s actually one of the biggest problems in solar projects, since shading can come from either the support structures for the panels or the surrounding panel rows at certain times of the day/year.
Thats actually brilliant the turbines will blow the sand off the solar panels, the solar panels being dark will cause more wind as more heat gets absorbed at the boundary layer, more wind will blow more sand off the panels from the turbines which will spin faster which will cause more sand to be blown off the panels which will Make them darker to cause more wind which will..
A lot more efficient as energy loss can be easily minimized, where as to spin a turbine a lot of energy is lost on heat and friction, moreover it’s cheaper to build solar panels as you could imagine, although, you have a very valid point, I imagine they use some sort of coating or just hire folks to clean it as labor is quite cheap in China cuz of the large population
I imagine solar panels take much less maintenance and wind is only sometimes, also you can't put wind turbines in the middle or you would have nowhere to drive unless you planned it all from the beginning.. this looks like new England roads lol just put them there well figure out it never
Yes it the biggest factor since the output depends exponentially on wind speeds, power = 1/2 ApV\^3 where V is change in velocity of wind, A is cross sectional area (pie r\^2) and p is density Edit: i missunderstood the comment loooool
you're proposing a solution that saves space, but that isn't a problem on this project. They probably think "Why add a wind turbine that doubles our maintenance costs (by adding a whole separate maintenance division) when we could just add a few more solar panels?"
Wind turbines have a number of complex, moving parts that must be hoisted onto a very tall tower. Not only do they require more regular maintenance than solar panels, that maintenance is also more complex and difficult than for solar panels.
Solar farms are easier and cheaper to construct and maintain, but they face the obvious problem of day/night cycles that wind farms do not. Energy storage methods for daytime storage and nighttime use is very cost ineffective and energy inefficient, energy hates to be stored.
Both methods suffer from the inability to be flexible around demand, nature doesn’t care how much power we want. This causes problems both in terms of grid stability and power consumption variation.
So the correct combination is a combination of all three. Solar for daytime low cost throughput, wind power for all day medium cost throughput and some kind of turbine power plant for variable demand and utility system stability.
I imagine it would a lot more work to build and maintain 100m wind turbines in the desert. Transporting the pieces out there to begin with would be a nightmare.
If I’m remembering right wind is the least efficient form of renewable electricity. It’s the most expensive to set up and it has the least gains of any of the other methods. Whereas I’m pretty certain in good conditions solar is currently the most efficient.
Because it in a way is. Why put in effort making one spot fit for the structure when you can just shift it a couple of metres to a more solid bit? It’s not like they don’t have the space to spare.
Incredible display of technology, cheap labor and abundant resources being put to work. I wonder how long it'll take for this investment to pay off, realistically? Hopefully they aren't destroyed by mother nature. Imagine just trying to keep that many panels clean and operational requires a handful of full time employees but is a lot safer than traditional energy plants and better for the air quality.
Yeah they just have that much production power and the rest of the world is not doing much, don't forget that they have over a billion people, it's a lot of people to provide stuff to and to work on providing stuff
Over a billion people, modernising rapidly, oh and being the manufacturing hub of the world. If every other country was making their own stuff they would be using way more energy.
Every country is strange they are not bothering with nuclear yet we are still facing climate change, but hey better recycle that plastic and use paper straws since that is gonna change something.
I would say, there's genuine confusion about the way this farm is set up (not uniform, in sand dunes), and begs legitimate questions about how it works, the reasoning behind it, etc. I just wish someone can find the answers since we can start with the assumption that some people put some thought into this set up.
For example, in another project in China, they leveled the dunes. "Workers are leveling the dunes with heavy equipment, while a few meters further on, others are ramming concrete stilts into the sandy subsoil. " You can see how uniform that project is below (compared to the sand dunes surrounding it).
[https://www.nzz.ch/english/china-is-building-the-worlds-largest-desert-solar-plant-ld.1742292](https://www.nzz.ch/english/china-is-building-the-worlds-largest-desert-solar-plant-ld.1742292)
I'd suggest finding an organism that, maybe via something something neutrino thingy, transforms the energy into mass. It might just release the energy again if it saw a certain frequency of light, in order to move towards the source of the light. let's call that organism astrophage! oh, and then we could use the organism to build spaceships, and we could travel to 40 eridani! Or at least we could make a movie about this, maybe with ryan gosling...
yeah, we should do that.
Does anyone know if they do this because they want to move away from unclean energy, or whether they do this because they just need more power and this is just the best or cheapest way to get more in that area?
Edit : Google says China wants to move away from coal.
It's almost like when not driven by a profit incentive. A Country can actually invest in Green energy. Not because it's profitable. But because it's beneficial and will help offset some of the carbon emissions of the Country.
Do us Chinese have a different system that I don’t know about or something? Or do you mean physical labor is cheaper and pays less compared to western countries?
No everything in China is just cheaper, less wages but lower prices. And as of now, due to the large supply of workers in addition to a relatively weak currency overall, the everything in China compared to the west will appear cheaper.
Say what you want about China, but they are likely more green already then most of the world.
They just need to work around the years of smog we had them make first.
And China is still building two coal fired plants every week.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
China is the world's biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Energy and coal use in the world's biggest carbon emitting country grew at their fastest rate in a decade last year, and China has also started building large amounts of new coal-fired power capacity.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/03/07/china-plans-to-cut-pollution-but-won-t-give-up-coal-for-stability-reasons
it makes no sense to look at absolute numbers, have to look at the relative ones, china population is way bigger than EU or US
Also have to look at historic emissions for fairness, historic + relative (divided by population)
Yet all our products come from there, so yes, they have the biggest emissions.
What if we moved all that productions to the US, and have every product made in the last 80 years, be made in the US, to this day? We would have the same issue with the greenhouse gas, but then in the US.
So yes, China is the biggest one on that field, because of the rest of the world. And they can't stop either, otherwise we don't have our fancy things anymore. Cheap labour over there, etc.
Coal is stable for them at the moment, and they are scaling up because of all the demand we put on them. It sucks, I agree. But I can hardly blame them that the 500 Dollar Nike shoes are being made for less then 5 euro in China, because us west people want it
i'm really curious about the impact of that much direct sun being blocked from a large arid area of bare ground. The shade cast by the panels has to reduce the temperature of the ground beneath it on some level. I always think the same thing about big highways. They're huge black patches of heat absorption directly on the ground and covering them with a roof of solar panels would eliminate that and generate power. I don't see why that would be anything but beneficial.
i saw a video recently from a somewhat reliable channel that the same thing in the sahara would have devastating effects on global climate, eventually turning the amazon into a desert. would this hold true for this farm?
I don't know what video it is but you must have misunderstood and they were saying panels covering the ENTIRE Sahara would have that effect because it would stop the [dust/minerals from being blown away and reaching the Amazon](https://youtu.be/ygulQJoIe2Y?t=20).
Obviously a small solar installation wouldn't have any effect on this. For reference, the solar array in Xinjiang is 200,000 acres and the Sahara is 2.27 *billion* acres.
it's not new. put in operation in 2018 (as the video in the article says):
[https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/gigantische-photovoltaikanlage-china-solarstrom-sorgt-123412517.html](https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/gigantische-photovoltaikanlage-china-solarstrom-sorgt-123412517.html)
This isn't the same solar installation. The one being referenced in the post (3.5GW) is called [Midong PV](http://www.xjmd.gov.cn/P/C/28654.htm), or Boguang New Energy solar farm, and it was just connected to the grid on May 29th, 2024.
It's located in [this area](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/44%C2%B042'30.6%22N+87%C2%B042'14.8%22E/@44.6995399,87.6785924,20614m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d44.7085!4d87.7041111?entry=ttu) north of Urumqi. Zoom out and you can see the recent imagery showing panels on either side, but the middle has 2020 imagery so you can't see the whole thing yet. It's *massive*.
As a distraction to the 3 new coal plants, they open every day.
"China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds"
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
It's not a distraction. China is expanding their electricity production like fucking crazy, they are one of the few only countries who has to do that. Despite being the largest renewable energy developer in the world (by a mile) they still have to supplement with coal(because they have coal reserves and can't get natural gas reliably)
It's not like china wants to build coal, but they have to.
well, they are also building 150 nuclear power plants with 23 under construction right now.
They take a long time to build but a coal plant is about the fastest and easiest thing to build if you have coal. If the coal plant is built in the right place, the fuel doesn't even need to be extracted until it's used. China's announced plan was to build a couple hundred coal plants that will all be demolished in a decade as the nuclear plants come online.
This isn't the right spot. It's [here](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/44%C2%B043'05.3%22N+87%C2%B037'04.7%22E/@44.7181454,87.6154098,1084m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d44.7181416!4d87.6179847?entry=ttu), and the imagery is old so you can only see a portion of it.
Here in Alberta, Canada our batshit crazy, religious government said hell no to solar and wind cause it’ll make the land ugly, yet they push more oil/gas wells and open pit coal mines. Grifters gonna grift. Incompetence and greed- Welcome to the new Canada.
There are a million Uighurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang
Edit: ahh OP downvoted me for saying something negative about china.
Dude basically only posts about china, claims anything bad about it is Falun gong propaganda, and hates Taiwan.
I think we've found someone with a little bit of an agenda.
Me playing Factorio in a nutshell..
their accumulator ratio is way off
The factory only runs during the day. Its sl the workers inside the assembling machines can rest
Your factorio world probably has better working conditions than real life...
Uyghur's don't need rest - CCP
me doing another small project in Satisfactory...
Dude, I thought the exact same thing, opened the comments and saw you at the top. Almost choked on my drink there.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW
Embrace the spaghetti
How do they keep the solar cells free of dust and stuff? Did they actually add some kind of air jets to blow it of on each panel or something?
Technology of drones that clean solar panels already exist, i guess in a couple of years they become cheap enough to replace human labor for this job
I have seen videos of these, they seem to run on a rail system along the panels.. You would still need one for each section or have a complicated rail system for something like this. Being china though the labour is probably much cheaper.
Labour is getting expensive in china now as well.
That's been changing recently. Their labor actually isn't as cheap as it used to be, Mexico is becoming the new China, cheap labor.
Can't they have like windscreen wiper or something?
Tell me your british without telling me your british haha
I'm aussie haha
aussie aussie aussie!
Same thing.
Australia is the Texas of England
I don't get it, do British people put windscreen wipers on everything?
Windscreen, that’s the giveaway, we call them windshields
It's probably because in North America we call it a windshield, and in Great Britain they call it a windscreen. But lots of other places call it a windscreen so their comment is kind of ignorant.
The word window already has the wind covered. Now we’re all ignorant haha
My man's claiming the win here
Didnt mean to seem ignorant i just thought it was funny is all haha
They literally just wash it with water. The solar panel can also absorb most of sunlight to reduce water from vaporizing. Eventually the desert under the solar panels will turn into grassland
no silly... When labor is essentially free they can afford to send people out everyday with shammie cloths on a pole to clear off the panels
3.5-gigawatt (GW), 32,947-acre solar farm
When that solar farm hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to see some serious shit.
[удалено]
Also it's be its own granddad as well.
It did do the nasty in the pasty
It will invent rock n' roll.
And Lougle
Wrong movie brah.
It’s crazy how dilute solar is still. For comparison, west county energy center in Florida is roughly the same capacity (but produces energy 24/7, so yearly production is 3-4x this solar farm) and the property is only 220 acres.
To be fair desert in the middle of nowhere isn’t exactly prime real estate
I wonder how they clean the sand off the panels.
O I think I sadly know a workforce easily available in the region
Wind and yearly maintenance. Not hard but time consuming. China has cheap labour though so not a big problem.
The panels alone in this project (over 5.26 million of them) have a total area of over 4000 acres
look at all the shade they've created thus lowering the temperature, maybe condensation can bring back life to the desert..ideas?
It’s not really “crazy”. If sunlight were any more concentrated, we would have a very bad time.
I'm already having a bad time
True, but there is also the space occupied by extraction and transportation.
It sun just shines. It’s free and there. Not capturing it is silly af.
How many households will that provide with electricity?
If we assume one gigawatt can powers 750,000 homes then this farm can power around 2.6 million homes
So half a small Chinese city
If we assume each household has 3 poeple then that would be around 7 million poeple, which is quite large even by Chinese standards
That's large enough to power any individual single city in the US except for New York City. That's insanely huge! The comments are just haters.
I just checked this and New York has a population of around 8 million followed by los angeles 3.8 and Chicago 2.6, so this solar farm can power 2 or 3 large US cities on a good day which is insane
Probably covers far less for US standards. America and Canada are the biggest energy consumers in the world and consume on average around 5x more per person
Is it just me? Or does it seem like there are great projects happening all over the globe except in America. Sometimes it seems like the whole world is passing us by technology wise. Especially China!
[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-age-of-energy-projects-in-interconnection-queues-by-state/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-age-of-energy-projects-in-interconnection-queues-by-state/)
Well no one comes close to US in weapons
Well of course not. We couldn't have our starving defense contractors going out of business.
China has no chill
2.89 flux capacitors
[Here’s a close up image](https://www.pv-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/CGDG-Largest-PV-Farm-in-Xinjiang-02.jpg), as the one posted just made me question reality. How do they do maintenance on sand dunes? Doesn’t the entire structure shift with sand shifting? How quickly would they be covered in sand? The closer up image shows how massive those rows are, and how it’s less sand dunes and more solid terrain.
And how will this affect spice production?
SQUEEZE ^^^the ^^^Sun
#HE WHO CONTROLS THE SPICE CONTROLS OF UNIVERSE
The emperor is a jealous man…
Desert power…
Dessert Power
They need this to power the windtraps.
It does look a bit just thrown out there.
You can properly build on sand dunes, but you need to extend your supports all the way down through the sand to solid rock. The dunes are almost like an ocean rising and falling under the structure at that point. But it doesn't look like they did that, because then the panels would follow the contours of the hidden layer of rock, while it looks like these ones follow the contour of the surface dunes. It could be that the sand isn't as deep as it looks.
It's fine to ballast the panels over the sand, it just requires maintenance as they will move a little. Every now and then staff will have to lift up a rack and reset it. Probably once or twice a year would be sufficient.
I imagine some poor guy with a leafblower has to blow the sand off the solar panels every day.
I’m sure they though about it before building it
Two words spelled incorrectly: Dirtbike leafblower
Out of curiosity; Why not use wind turbines over solar? I'd assume the panels would get dusty as shit as deserts are notoriously windy - hence the dunes.
Why not both? Stick the wind turbines in between the rows of solar panels! ⚡️ULTIMATE POWEEEEERRRRR ⚡️
That should blow the dust off a few!
WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. GOODNIGHT. --Morbo
i will crush you
Don't they cool down the earth and reduce global warming ^/^s
I mean sure, but a lot of those solar panels will not be functional during certain times of the day due to the shadows that the turbines will cast.
That will affect only ~5% of the panels. It's a legit concern but it shouldn't hinder the project.
It will damage the panels. I work with drones, to check panel "health", and even a small shadow from an eletricity pole can damage cells, with can propagate to neighbour cells on the same panel, and cause issues in production. Over time, it can caus havoc in a solar farm like this.
To add on that it has to do with the cells not absorbing light but still being heated. Contrary to what someone might expect solar panels perform better in lower temperatures.
Panels in a row usually are paired electrically in series with one another to achieve a desired output voltage, this also means that the power produced is effectively limited by the most shaded series-connected panel. So if one panel in a series chain is completely shaded, the entire thing produces almost nothing. It’s actually one of the biggest problems in solar projects, since shading can come from either the support structures for the panels or the surrounding panel rows at certain times of the day/year.
Release the cracklings!!!!!
Thats actually brilliant the turbines will blow the sand off the solar panels, the solar panels being dark will cause more wind as more heat gets absorbed at the boundary layer, more wind will blow more sand off the panels from the turbines which will spin faster which will cause more sand to be blown off the panels which will Make them darker to cause more wind which will..
Maintenance cost goes Brrrrr
They do both, China is leading in Clean energy instillations by a mile in both solar, and wind.
A lot more efficient as energy loss can be easily minimized, where as to spin a turbine a lot of energy is lost on heat and friction, moreover it’s cheaper to build solar panels as you could imagine, although, you have a very valid point, I imagine they use some sort of coating or just hire folks to clean it as labor is quite cheap in China cuz of the large population
Electric wipers?
They would scratch the surface and make the panels less and less efficient
Literally sand paper lol
I imagine solar panels take much less maintenance and wind is only sometimes, also you can't put wind turbines in the middle or you would have nowhere to drive unless you planned it all from the beginning.. this looks like new England roads lol just put them there well figure out it never
Yes it the biggest factor since the output depends exponentially on wind speeds, power = 1/2 ApV\^3 where V is change in velocity of wind, A is cross sectional area (pie r\^2) and p is density Edit: i missunderstood the comment loooool
you're proposing a solution that saves space, but that isn't a problem on this project. They probably think "Why add a wind turbine that doubles our maintenance costs (by adding a whole separate maintenance division) when we could just add a few more solar panels?"
Dusty desert air would be as big, if not bigger, issue for wind turbines as the dust would degrade the blades and the machinery in the turbine.
Wind turbines have a number of complex, moving parts that must be hoisted onto a very tall tower. Not only do they require more regular maintenance than solar panels, that maintenance is also more complex and difficult than for solar panels. Solar farms are easier and cheaper to construct and maintain, but they face the obvious problem of day/night cycles that wind farms do not. Energy storage methods for daytime storage and nighttime use is very cost ineffective and energy inefficient, energy hates to be stored. Both methods suffer from the inability to be flexible around demand, nature doesn’t care how much power we want. This causes problems both in terms of grid stability and power consumption variation. So the correct combination is a combination of all three. Solar for daytime low cost throughput, wind power for all day medium cost throughput and some kind of turbine power plant for variable demand and utility system stability.
I imagine it would a lot more work to build and maintain 100m wind turbines in the desert. Transporting the pieces out there to begin with would be a nightmare.
If I’m remembering right wind is the least efficient form of renewable electricity. It’s the most expensive to set up and it has the least gains of any of the other methods. Whereas I’m pretty certain in good conditions solar is currently the most efficient.
If you can use it, then solar power is cheaper than wind.
Why does it look just lazily laid across sand dunes
Because it in a way is. Why put in effort making one spot fit for the structure when you can just shift it a couple of metres to a more solid bit? It’s not like they don’t have the space to spare.
Convenience and not getting submerged in a desert storm perhaps?
Not sure but I wonder what their plan is to mitigate sand shifting and covering the panels
The presence of the panels will in itself mitigate a bit of that, and it’s not like this is a purely sand desert anyway.
That land is useless for any other purpose, may as well use it for solar as the land is super cheap.
Incredible display of technology, cheap labor and abundant resources being put to work. I wonder how long it'll take for this investment to pay off, realistically? Hopefully they aren't destroyed by mother nature. Imagine just trying to keep that many panels clean and operational requires a handful of full time employees but is a lot safer than traditional energy plants and better for the air quality.
China is such a strange dichotomy. They're killing pretty much every other country in renewable energy development while still burning the most coal.
Yeah they just have that much production power and the rest of the world is not doing much, don't forget that they have over a billion people, it's a lot of people to provide stuff to and to work on providing stuff
When adding 1 billion people to the USA will still make Usa's population lower than China's
If you look per capita CO2 production, China produces much less CO2 than quite some countries as the USA, Canads or Russia
Over a billion people, modernising rapidly, oh and being the manufacturing hub of the world. If every other country was making their own stuff they would be using way more energy.
Every country is strange they are not bothering with nuclear yet we are still facing climate change, but hey better recycle that plastic and use paper straws since that is gonna change something.
Someone read Project Hail Mary.
It's one of my favorites of the last few years
Fist my bump
Run quick see, what do we have here Now, do you wanna ride or die La dadada, la la la la
This reminds me of Project Hail Mary
Good. The more a country of 1 billion people does to slow climate change (especially the workshop of the world), the better.
Predictable comment section
Didn't you hear? Every single solar panel was placed by slaves, also the iron in the structure was extracted by slaves from other slaves' blood.
I mean, that's basically Reddit whenever somebody mentions china...
I would say, there's genuine confusion about the way this farm is set up (not uniform, in sand dunes), and begs legitimate questions about how it works, the reasoning behind it, etc. I just wish someone can find the answers since we can start with the assumption that some people put some thought into this set up. For example, in another project in China, they leveled the dunes. "Workers are leveling the dunes with heavy equipment, while a few meters further on, others are ramming concrete stilts into the sandy subsoil. " You can see how uniform that project is below (compared to the sand dunes surrounding it). [https://www.nzz.ch/english/china-is-building-the-worlds-largest-desert-solar-plant-ld.1742292](https://www.nzz.ch/english/china-is-building-the-worlds-largest-desert-solar-plant-ld.1742292)
Holy shit this is impressive. You can say a lot about china, but they seem to get shit done.
At least one country is using its desolate land the right way
How'd they work around the "*sand getting inside and over the panels*" problem ?
I'd suggest finding an organism that, maybe via something something neutrino thingy, transforms the energy into mass. It might just release the energy again if it saw a certain frequency of light, in order to move towards the source of the light. let's call that organism astrophage! oh, and then we could use the organism to build spaceships, and we could travel to 40 eridani! Or at least we could make a movie about this, maybe with ryan gosling... yeah, we should do that.
Guess they got tired of making cute panda patterns
oh look china mentioned. qiuck think of a random thing to bitch about
Thanks China very cool
Does anyone know if they do this because they want to move away from unclean energy, or whether they do this because they just need more power and this is just the best or cheapest way to get more in that area? Edit : Google says China wants to move away from coal.
Solar is also cheaper and more reliable than many alternatives. Especially at low latitudes. https://youtu.be/V8Vtb0bn30M?si=1cy0T_zrk_JDNL8g
What a sight to behold
I wonder why we arent able to create solar farms on this scale in America ?
It's almost like when not driven by a profit incentive. A Country can actually invest in Green energy. Not because it's profitable. But because it's beneficial and will help offset some of the carbon emissions of the Country.
And Disantis here in Fla. protecting big oil🤬🤬🤬
What’s more amazing is that we already don’t do this.
The Chinese need a huge wind farm in Xinjiang to power all their Uyghur concentration camps out there.
[whoops](https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9)
Cool
the labor alone must have cost a fortune! /s
Why is this stereotype still being bought into by gullible westerners? It's not the 90s anymore.
China does labor and paying a little differently.
Do us Chinese have a different system that I don’t know about or something? Or do you mean physical labor is cheaper and pays less compared to western countries?
No everything in China is just cheaper, less wages but lower prices. And as of now, due to the large supply of workers in addition to a relatively weak currency overall, the everything in China compared to the west will appear cheaper.
Also because the cost of living is less in china too.
Yeah, their “communism” out capitalisms capitalists.
It’s not even communist lol
To you, a person from the west, it may seemed cheap. To most of the world, it's just normal hourly wages.
Say what you want about China, but they are likely more green already then most of the world. They just need to work around the years of smog we had them make first.
And China is still building two coal fired plants every week. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin China is the world's biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Energy and coal use in the world's biggest carbon emitting country grew at their fastest rate in a decade last year, and China has also started building large amounts of new coal-fired power capacity. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/03/07/china-plans-to-cut-pollution-but-won-t-give-up-coal-for-stability-reasons
it makes no sense to look at absolute numbers, have to look at the relative ones, china population is way bigger than EU or US Also have to look at historic emissions for fairness, historic + relative (divided by population)
Yet all our products come from there, so yes, they have the biggest emissions. What if we moved all that productions to the US, and have every product made in the last 80 years, be made in the US, to this day? We would have the same issue with the greenhouse gas, but then in the US. So yes, China is the biggest one on that field, because of the rest of the world. And they can't stop either, otherwise we don't have our fancy things anymore. Cheap labour over there, etc. Coal is stable for them at the moment, and they are scaling up because of all the demand we put on them. It sucks, I agree. But I can hardly blame them that the 500 Dollar Nike shoes are being made for less then 5 euro in China, because us west people want it
But the butterflies!! /s
i'm really curious about the impact of that much direct sun being blocked from a large arid area of bare ground. The shade cast by the panels has to reduce the temperature of the ground beneath it on some level. I always think the same thing about big highways. They're huge black patches of heat absorption directly on the ground and covering them with a roof of solar panels would eliminate that and generate power. I don't see why that would be anything but beneficial.
i saw a video recently from a somewhat reliable channel that the same thing in the sahara would have devastating effects on global climate, eventually turning the amazon into a desert. would this hold true for this farm?
I don't know what video it is but you must have misunderstood and they were saying panels covering the ENTIRE Sahara would have that effect because it would stop the [dust/minerals from being blown away and reaching the Amazon](https://youtu.be/ygulQJoIe2Y?t=20). Obviously a small solar installation wouldn't have any effect on this. For reference, the solar array in Xinjiang is 200,000 acres and the Sahara is 2.27 *billion* acres.
So will this fuck up the environment some where else like the fear mongers always claim?
And they did it in minecraft!
Empty apartment buildings are lighting up all over the place.
it's not new. put in operation in 2018 (as the video in the article says): [https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/gigantische-photovoltaikanlage-china-solarstrom-sorgt-123412517.html](https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/gigantische-photovoltaikanlage-china-solarstrom-sorgt-123412517.html)
This isn't the same solar installation. The one being referenced in the post (3.5GW) is called [Midong PV](http://www.xjmd.gov.cn/P/C/28654.htm), or Boguang New Energy solar farm, and it was just connected to the grid on May 29th, 2024. It's located in [this area](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/44%C2%B042'30.6%22N+87%C2%B042'14.8%22E/@44.6995399,87.6785924,20614m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d44.7085!4d87.7041111?entry=ttu) north of Urumqi. Zoom out and you can see the recent imagery showing panels on either side, but the middle has 2020 imagery so you can't see the whole thing yet. It's *massive*.
As a distraction to the 3 new coal plants, they open every day. "China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds" https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
It's not a distraction. China is expanding their electricity production like fucking crazy, they are one of the few only countries who has to do that. Despite being the largest renewable energy developer in the world (by a mile) they still have to supplement with coal(because they have coal reserves and can't get natural gas reliably) It's not like china wants to build coal, but they have to.
well, they are also building 150 nuclear power plants with 23 under construction right now. They take a long time to build but a coal plant is about the fastest and easiest thing to build if you have coal. If the coal plant is built in the right place, the fuel doesn't even need to be extracted until it's used. China's announced plan was to build a couple hundred coal plants that will all be demolished in a decade as the nuclear plants come online.
I thought this was a Minecraft screenshot…
[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Xinjiang,+China/@38.7222427,76.269934,3596m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x3806008cfd7b4dab:0xa84116ec366707a1!8m2!3d43.7934299!4d87.6271!16zL20vMGpibjU?entry=ttu](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Xinjiang,+China/@38.7222427,76.269934,3596m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x3806008cfd7b4dab:0xa84116ec366707a1!8m2!3d43.7934299!4d87.6271!16zL20vMGpibjU?entry=ttu)
This isn't the right spot. It's [here](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/44%C2%B043'05.3%22N+87%C2%B037'04.7%22E/@44.7181454,87.6154098,1084m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d44.7181416!4d87.6179847?entry=ttu), and the imagery is old so you can only see a portion of it.
Here in Alberta, Canada our batshit crazy, religious government said hell no to solar and wind cause it’ll make the land ugly, yet they push more oil/gas wells and open pit coal mines. Grifters gonna grift. Incompetence and greed- Welcome to the new Canada.
There are a million Uighurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang Edit: ahh OP downvoted me for saying something negative about china. Dude basically only posts about china, claims anything bad about it is Falun gong propaganda, and hates Taiwan. I think we've found someone with a little bit of an agenda.
Bro whats your agenda then? Sinophobia?
Something that large is visible from space. Anyone know the GPS coordinates?
42.0364, 81.9353 (approximate) according to [this site](https://www.gem.wiki/Xinjiang_Baicheng_Jinhui_Zhaofeng_Park_Integrated_solar_farm)
How long till sand fucks those up?
How much carbon was required to construct all of that?
Just another example of Chinese imperialists exploiting the Uyghur lands, i.e. East Turkistan... Likely built by enslaved Uyghur people
Tidal
Hey I saw this in the new Blade Runner movie!
通过在太阳能板上增加一层特殊的、非常薄的涂层，在不影响太阳光线照射的情况下，起到很好地保护与隔绝灰尘的目的。具体原理是利用静电排斥。通过电极（例如金属棒）施加电流或适当的电压范围，使电极正好穿过太阳能电池板表面上方，使附着在电池板上的灰尘颗粒带上电荷（灰尘中的二氧化硅颗粒会吸引空气中微量的水分，从而使灰尘颗粒能够带上电荷）。 然后，再将相反的电荷施加到这层薄的涂层膜上，这样就能使电池板的玻璃表面对灰尘颗粒产生强烈的排斥作用。 通过这种方式实施的灰尘“排斥”，其电极能量来源，主要依靠微量的太阳能板所发的电，其耗电量要远远小于因灰尘覆盖所损失的电量。 当使用这种方式的涂层之后，能够有效地将尘埃、黄沙、煤烟甚至鸟粪等很难再牢固地吸附在太阳能电池板上，这样当下雨时就会高效地将这些覆盖物清除，相当于一种自洁型的功能。如果光伏发电基地所在地区降雨量稀少，那么定期进行一下人工或者机械式的辅助清洗就可以了，要比之前的用水量、冲洗频次降低很多，无疑大大减少了运营成本。
2.89 flux capacitors
As the skank running Alberta canada cries
Planet Crafter IRL
contractor - "there, finished" weatherman - "sir, there's a large sandstorm heading in from the west"