Wole Soyinka is arguably Africa’s greatest poet, author and teacher. Yet he was a man of few words when he remarked, “A tiger does not shout its tigritude [tigerness], it acts”. Take the Three Gorges Dam, for example. The world’s largest hydroelectric project has 32 generators putting out 700 megawatts each. That is about the size of 20 nuclear power stations. China’s next great leap forward involves vast floating arrays of solar panels.
China’s 2020 Energy Master Plan
China has two macro energy problems. It is the top coal producer and relies almost entirely on fossil fuel for power generation. Its cities are choking in smog, yet at the same time, it has excess generating capacity because of the world economic downturn. China’s vast landmass and abundant sunshine make solar energy almost a no-brainer.
Chinese solar power made a great leap forward with the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park on the Tibetan Plateau in eastern China. There, four million solar panels deliver 850 megawatts of energy. That’s the size of a conventional power station. The fuel comes free, but the land does not. Now China wants to build floating solar farms to work around the land issue. Imagine this …
Great Leap Forward to the World’s Biggest Solar Lake
The beauty of this 120,000-panel project is the site comes free, courtesy of an abandoned coalmine that collapsed, and formed a lake. In this instance, the water resource was not disturbed, and there no was sacrifice of arable land, as so often happens with coal and nuclear power stations.
We cannot help remarking on the irony of green solar power replacing a filthy old coalmine. The company that completed the great leap forward for solar was Sungrow. It is the world’s largest inverter manufacturer. It also produces solar-battery-inverter hybrids, helping homeowners max their self-use of solar power.
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