The world’s largest solar farm will power 6 million homes

China’s state-owned power company has announced plans to build the world’s largest solar farm, which will be able to power a small country.

The £8.5 billion project will be built in the Inner Mongolia region in northern China and will supply electricity to the Jing-Jin-Ji urban cluster, which covers Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei.

The 8 gigawatt installation represents more than half of the UK’s total installed capacity and has the capacity to power around 6 million homes.

The integrated energy project will also include 4 GW of wind, 4 GW of coal-fired power and 200 MW of solar power, with an additional 5 GWh of energy to be added on-site in the form of battery storage.

The construction, operated by the Chinese company Three Gorges Renewables Group, is scheduled to start in September 2024, and the facility is scheduled to be put into operation in June 2027.

Plans for the new facility were announced just weeks after a 5GW complex came online in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, becoming the largest operational solar plant in the world.

Spanning 200,000 acres in the desert, the massive solar farm takes up as much space as New York City.

China has installed more solar power plants than any other country, with more than 600 GW connected to the grid as of November 2023.

The country continues to expand its solar power capacity and last year put into service as much energy as every other country in the world combined in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“While renewable capacity growth in Europe, the United States and Brazil has reached record levels, the acceleration in China has been extraordinary,” the International Energy Agency noted in a recent report on renewable energy.

“China’s role is crucial to achieving the global target of tripling the share of renewable energy, as the country is expected to install more than half of the new capacity required globally by 2030.”