China plans to build 450 gigawatts of wind and solar power capacity in the Gobi Desert by 2030. That’s more than twice the total amount of solar and wind power installed in the USA. The scaling up of renewable deployment should be a major economic boost for China’s underdeveloped western regions. This is the positive side of the China climate story. People should get used to big number. China’s challenge is how to stop the coal side of the story, which is growing in equally big numbers. The Gobi Desert straddles China’s northern border with Mongolia. The land is cheap and there is lots of wind and sunshine. The province of Inner Mongolia, which includes most of China’s Gobi Desert, is the biggest producer of coal in China and has pursued a coal-led recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. China has brought the costs of manufacturing solar panels down and is able to use these cheap domestic panels in projects like this.
Similar programmes in the early 2010s were hampered by bottlenecks in the grid infrastructure to deliver the electricity to major cities. This meant renewable producers had to make less electricity than they could have done. Maintaining a large solar farm in the desert would be relatively expensive because of the region’s remoteness, the steep difference between day and nighttime temperatures and the high level of dust which reduces panels’ effectiveness. This would become a hot topic in the near future but by then, low labor cost, economies of scale, and some of the other factors that enabled the rapid development of the renewable energy industry in the first place will make China a leading performer.