World’s biggest co-located wind and solar project begins operations in China

The world’s largest co-located wind and solar project has begun operations in northwest China, consisting of 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of wind and 1.5 GW of solar.

Chinese green technology company Envision Energy announced on its English-language LinkedIn account this week that the project, built on the Loess Plateau in the northwest of the country, had begun official operations.

Located southeast of the massive Gobi Desert, the Loess Plateau measures 635,000-square-kilometres and accounts for around 6.6 per cent of China’s land area while also being home to over 100 million people.

Image Credit: Envision Energy, via LinkedIn

The complex terrain of valleys, desert edges, and hills presented Envision Energy with limited construction windows and challenging conditions to build.

In order to address these challenges, Envision used customed 5.56 megawatt (MW) wind turbines for the low-wind, mountainous conditions, featuring large rotors and high-capacity design so as to reduce the number of turbines needed.

Each of the 99-metre turbine blades had to negotiate long, steep, and winding roads to the site.

Image Credit: Envision Energy, via LinkedIn

“Once seen as a harsh and resource-constrained landscape, the Loess Plateau is now being transformed into a source of stable, large-scale green power,” the company said.

The wind and solar farm is expected to generate over 12 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity each year and will be delivered via ultra-high-voltage lines to industrial regions along China’s eastern coast.

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