In northwest Xinjiang, a state-owned company in China announced on Monday that it had successfully connected the largest solar plant in the world to the grid.
A notice on the website of the state asset regulator stated that the 200,000-acre, 5-gigawatt (GW) solar farm located in a desert area of the capital Urumqi went online on Monday, citing the Power Construction Corp of China.
An estimated 6.09 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity will be produced annually by the facility. That would be sufficient to power Papua New Guinea for a full year.
According to the Global Energy Monitor’s solar power tracker, the two largest operational solar facilities previously were also located in western China. These were the 3GW-capable Golmud Wutumeiren solar complex and the Ningxia Tenggeli desert solar project by Longyuan Power Group and China Lüfa Qinghai New Energy.
Rich in solar and wind resources, sparsely populated Xinjiang has emerged as a center for massive renewable energy bases, much of which is exported over long distances to China’s densely populated eastern seaboard.
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