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.
