China covers its deserts with solar panels to power its economy

"Before, there was nothing here (...) it was completely deserted," recalls Chang Yongfei, a native of Inner Mongolia province who previously worked in the coal sector, a historic pillar of the region's economy.

700 km from Beijing, these hundreds of thousands of panels represent the symbol of the energy transition in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Leader Xi Jinping pledged Wednesday to cut the country's net emissions by 7 to 10 percent by 2035, in a video address to a special UN summit in New York.

Solar installations in deserts and arid zones are a key link in this strategy: three times France's total electricity capacity must be installed there between 2022 and 2030, according to a planning document.

Satellite images analyzed by AFP confirm a rapid deployment of photovoltaics in the great Chinese deserts over the last ten years.

In Ordos in the Kubuqi Desert, where an AFP team visited, more than 100 km³ of sand have been covered with solar panels, an area the size of the city of Paris.

But this choice poses many challenges: sandstorms can damage the installations, and excessively high temperatures reduce the efficiency of the cells.

The accumulation of sand on the panels also requires a considerable amount of water to clean them, even in arid areas.

To overcome these difficulties, the panels used in Kubuqi are equipped with fans capable of self-cleaning and use bifacial technology to also capture light reflected off the sand, according to official media.

Tourist spot

The distance between deserts and consumption centers represents another obstacle to the development of these projects.

The Kubuqi solar power plants are intended to supply the provinces of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, hundreds of kilometers to the south.

There is a real risk of "congestion on transmission lines," notes David Fishman, senior partner at consulting firm Lantau Group.

For this reason, several provinces, including Inner Mongolia, "are restricting the approval of new projects," he adds.

These projects must also deal with the boom in tourism, which has exploded in the Kubuqi desert, stimulated by videos of quad bike expeditions and camel rides.

Driving his 4x4, Chang Yongfei, the former coal worker, now relies on this activity to earn a living.

Its huts with panoramic views in the middle of the dunes, a few steps from the solar field, are a hit on social networks.

"This (energy) transition has been very good for the region," emphasizes this 46-year-old father, admitting however to being "very worried" that the solar field will engulf the entire desert, and with it the tourist windfall.

"But I trust the government to leave us a small part," he says.

Maintaining coal

Other voices point out that the massive development of solar power has not signaled the abandonment of coal, particularly in Inner Mongolia.

China will commission new coal-fired power generation capacity in the first half of 2025, the largest since 2016, according to a report by the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

Around Kubuqi, soot-blackened trucks, endless trains filled with coal and large smoking chimneys bear witness to the vigor of this industry.

As long as coal "continues to play a role in China's energy system, it actually constitutes a structural obstacle to the expansion of wind and solar energy," wrote the NGO Greenpeace in June.

The deployment of large solar fields in deserts finally raises questions about their impact on the climate, notes Zhengyao Lu, a researcher at Lund University.

According to his models, the absorption of heat by large dark surfaces can alter atmospheric flows and have "negative side effects, for example with reduced precipitation" in other regions.

Rather than covering the largest possible area with solar panels, he advocates "more intelligent, localized and organized development, which combines energy production and ecological preservation."

But the risks of solar energy "remain minor compared to the dangers of maintaining greenhouse gas emissions," he concludes.