Why China Built 162 Square Miles of Solar Panels on the World’s Highest Plateau

 

Why China Built 162 Square Miles of Solar Panels on the World’s Highest Plateau

 

By Keith Bradsher

Reporting from Gonghe on the Tibetan Plateau

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibetan-plateau.html?searchResultPosition=3

 

On the Tibetan Plateau, nearly 10,000 feet high, solar panels stretch to the horizon and cover an area seven times the size of Manhattan. They soak up sunlight that is much brighter than at sea level because the air is so thin.

 

Wind turbines dot nearby ridgelines and stand in long rows across arid, empty plains above the occasional sheep herder with his flock. They capture night breezes, balancing the daytime power from the solar panels. Hydropower dams sit where rivers spill down long chasms at the edges of the plateau. And high-voltage power lines carry all this electricity to businesses and homes more than 1,000 miles away.

 

China is building an enormous network of clean energy industries on the Tibetan Plateau, the world’s highest. The intention is to harness the region’s bright sunshine, cold temperatures and sky-touching altitude to provide low-cost, renewable energy. The result is enough renewable energy to provide the plateau with nearly all of the power it needs, including for data centers used in China’s artificial intelligence development.

 

While China still burns as much coal as the rest of the world combined, last month President Xi Jinping made a stunning pledge. Speaking before the United Nations, he said for the first time that the country would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions across its economy and would expand renewable energy sixfold in coming years. It was a moment of global significance for the nation that is currently the world’s biggest polluter.

 

China’s clean energy efforts contrast with the ambitions of the United States under the Trump administration, which is using its diplomatic and economic muscle to pressure other countries to buy more American gas, oil and coal. China is investing in cheaper solar and wind technology, along with batteries and electric vehicles, with the aim of becoming the world’s supplier of renewable energy and the products that rely on it.

 

The main group of solar farms, known as the Talatan Solar Park, dwarfs every other cluster of solar farms in the world. It covers 162 square miles in Gonghe County, an alpine desert in sparsely inhabited Qinghai, a province in western China.

 

No other country on the planet is using high altitudes for solar, wind and hydropower on a scale as great as China’s on the Tibetan Plateau. The effort is a case study of how China has come to dominate the future of clean energy. With the help of substantial government-directed investment and planning, electricity companies are weaning the country off imported oil, natural gas and coal — a national priority.

 

Renewable energy helps China power 30,000 miles of high-speed train routes and its growing fleet of electric cars. At the same time, cheap electricity enables China to manufacture even more solar panels, which dominate global markets and power artificial intelligence data centers.

 

Electricity from solar and wind power in Qinghai, which occupies the northern third of the Tibetan Plateau, costs about 40 percent less than coal-fired power. Qinghai encompasses most of a region known among Tibetans as Amdo and includes the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, now in exile.

 

In July, China’s premier, Li Qiang, oversaw the groundbreaking of five additional dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in southern Tibet, a region of China that is tightly restricted by the Communist Party and not open to Western journalists. The Chinese government has released little information about the construction of the dams, but they are expected to take years to complete and would most likely constitute the world’s largest hydropower project. Its construction has alarmed India, which fears that China could use it to cut off water supplies to downstream areas of eastern India.

 

China is not the first country to experiment with high-altitude clean energy. But other places as high as the Tibetan Plateau are mountainous and steep. Qinghai, slightly bigger than Texas, is mostly flat — optimal for solar panels and the roads needed to bring them in. And the cold air improves the efficiency of solar panels.

 

Switzerland has experimented with small solar power installations at the top of cable railways. It opened a solar power farm at an altitude of 5,940 feet, but it can generate only about 0.5 megawatts, enough to power about 80 American households.

 

The state-owned Power Construction Corporation of China completed a 480-megawatt solar project last year at an altitude of 4,000 feet on the plateau of the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is the world’s driest nonpolar desert, but much lower than the Tibetan Plateau.

 

Qinghai’s Talatan solar project dwarfs these. It has a capacity of 16,930 megawatts of power, which could run every household in Chicago. It is still expanding, adding panels with a target of growing to 10 times the area of Manhattan in three years. Another 4,700 megawatts of wind energy and 7,380 megawatts of hydroelectric dams are nearby.

 

China is now building at even higher elevations in mountain valleys on the Tibetan Plateau, although with smaller solar farms. Near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a Chinese power company recently installed 150 megawatts of solar panels at 17,000 feet.

 

As an incentive to building solar farms, many western Chinese provinces initially offered free land to companies. The central government has recently ordered the provinces to begin charging nominal annual fees to encourage efficient use of the land.

 

The Talatan solar project is on sandy soil with sparse vegetation used as grazing lands by ethnic Tibetan herders. The first panels installed at the site in 2012 were so low to the ground that sheep had trouble grazing under and around them. Now all panels are installed on higher mountings, said Liu Ta, the project’s manager.

 

Dislocating people for power projects is politically sensitive all over the world. But high-altitude projects affect relatively few people in sparsely populated settlements. China pushed more than one million people out of their homes in west-central China a quarter-century ago and flooded a vast area for the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam. This year, China has been installing enough solar panels every three weeks to match the power generation capacity of that dam.

 

Generating wind power on the plateau is trickier. At high altitudes, the winds blow fast, but the thin air doesn’t push wind turbine blades as effectively as thicker air closer to sea level.

 

Still, the region has many wind turbines. Operators of the electricity grid try to balance the generation of solar power by day with wind power by night to maintain steady voltage and avoid blackouts.

 

Qinghai Province sends excess solar power to Shaanxi Province in west-central China. In exchange, Qinghai tops off the wind power generated locally at night with small amounts of electricity generated by Shaanxi coal plants.

 

In addition, Qinghai is increasingly turning to hydropower to balance the plateau’s solar power, in the hopes of using less coal-fired power.

 

More than a decade ago, eight dams were built on the Yellow River as it drops 3,300 feet, flowing off the eastern side of the plateau and down into eastern China. More are under construction to balance and supplement the solar energy being generated in Qinghai Province.

 

“When photovoltaic power is insufficient, I can use hydropower to make up for it,” said Zhu Yuanqing, power division director of the Qinghai Provincial Energy Bureau.

 

Two additional hydropower projects are being built in high mountain valleys near the Talatan Solar Park. The plan for both, Qinghai officials said, is to use excess solar power generated during the day to pump water up into the projects’ reservoirs several miles up. The water will be allowed to drop down through mountain tubes to the plateau at night, spinning giant turbines to generate immense amounts of electricity.

 

Several electricity-intensive industries are moving to the region to tap its inexpensive power. One is the task of turning quartzite from mines into polysilicon to make solar panels. Data centers for artificial intelligence are also drawn to the area.

 

Qinghai plans to increase its data center capacity more than five times by 2030. The facilities are in Xining, the provincial capital, at an altitude of 7,500 feet, and in Yushu and Guoluo, two chilly towns at an altitude over 12,000 feet.

 

The data centers consume 40 percent less electricity, their main operating cost, than similar ones at sea level because air-conditioning is barely needed, said Zhang Jingang, the executive vice governor of Qinghai. Air warmed by the data centers’ computer servers is circulated through underground pipes to heat other buildings in Yushu and Guoluo, replacing coal-fired boilers.

 

Mr. Zhang spoke at a news conference in Xining as part of a government-organized media tour this summer of clean energy sites in Qinghai, which usually restricts foreign media access to hide dissent by its large ethnic Tibetan population. The New York Times paid for its own travel costs.

 

To connect the data centers’ computing power to many of China’s technology companies, data is transferred from Shanghai to Qinghai on China’s national fiber-optic grid. The artificial intelligence programming of dancing humanoid robots for a televised gala during Lunar New Year in January was done at data centers in Qinghai.

 

But even fiber-optic cables do not provide quick enough communications for one of the fastest-growing computation needs in China: self-driving cars. The data centers for these cars are still in eastern China, where most of the population lives and drives.

 

“That kind of data center must not be placed in Qinghai,” Mr. Zhu said. “An accident may occur if you are not careful.”

 

Li You contributed research from Gonghe County.

 

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.