A Chinese power utility said on Monday it has connected the world’s biggest solar plant, in a desert area in northwestern Xinjiang, to the grid.
The 5-gigawatt (GW), 200,000-acre solar farm, outside the provincial capital Urumqi, came online on Monday, a notice on the state asset regulator’s website said, citing the Power Construction Corp of China.
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The facility will generate about 6.09 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year. That would be enough to power the country of Papua New Guinea for a year.
The two largest operational solar facilities previously were also in western China – Longyuan Power Group’s Ningxia Tenggeli desert solar project and China Lüfa Qinghai New Energy’s Golmud Wutumeiren solar complex, both with a capacity of 3GW, according to the Global Energy Monitor’s solar power tracker.
Sparsely populated Xinjiang, rich in solar and wind resources, has become a hub for massive renewable energy bases that send much of their power across long distances to China’s densely populated eastern seaboard.
- Reuters with additional editing by Jim Pollard
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