World’s Largest Solar PlantIs Planned for Northwestern China

Two Chinese companies have announced that they intend to build a solar energy plant in northwestern China that would power a city of 750,000 people, which would make the project the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic energy. The two companies — China Technology Development Group Corp. and Qinghai New Energy Group — said they will begin building a 30-megawatt solar power station in the Qaidam Basin this year but eventually plan to construct a massive facility that will produce 1 gigawatt of power. The companies said their power station will use a combination of traditional silicon-based photovoltaic cells as well as newer thin-film solar technology. If eventually built, the Qaidam project would generate twice the electricity of the recently announced record-setting solar power project, a joint venture between the California utility PG&E Corp. and the thin-film solar company, OptiSolar.