Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: January 22, 2025
The Great Solar Wall of China!
China is building a “Great Solar Wall” in the Kubuqi Desert, and it’s producing clean electrons while fighting desertification.
Tell Congress to support America’s Western Solar Plan!
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Reasons For Hope
NASA recently published new satellite imagery of China’s ever-expanding “Great Solar Wall” energy fields, currently consisting of over 5.4 GW (5,400 MW) of solar capacity in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia. The Kubuqi region, which as a flat, sunny, and desolate area relatively close to major cities is ideally located for solar power, is planned to host 100 GW of solar by 2030. And NASA reports that building solar farms there will likely slow desertification, preventing dune movement and encouraging grass growth. The Solar Age continues to accelerate, with more and more large-scale solar farms bringing a cornucopia of benefits to global decarbonization as well as local economies and ecosystems!
”The construction is part of China’s multiyear plan to build a “solar great wall” designed to generate enough energy to power Beijing…
In addition to generating power, planners hope that the installation will have other benefits. They think it may help curb desertification by preventing the movement of dunes and slowing winds. Also, the elevated panels create shade that slows evaporation and may make it easier to grow pasture grasses and other crops beneath them.
Analysis of Landsat data indicates that solar projects have contributed to the greening of deserts in other parts of China in recent years.”
— NASA Earth Observatory
Solar farms are a giant win-win-win for clean air, energy abundance, and national security. Right now, the U.S. has a great opportunity to supercharge domestic solar progress.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management recently finalized the new Western Solar Plan, identifying 31 million acres of federal land in the American West that are optimal for solar development, with both high solar potential and low conflict with wildlife habitat. The Plan also prioritizes areas that are close to existing power lines and on previously disturbed lands. Notably, any future proposed solar projects in these optimal areas will likely get an expedited simpler and faster federal permitting process, helping overcome one of the major bureaucratic obstacles to clean energy progress. The Wilderness Society estimates that if just 700,000 (0.7 million) acres of this area eventually get solar farms, it would displace carbon emissions roughly equivalent to closing 30 coal plants!
The Western Solar Plan is a critical strategic roadmap for the United States to stay competitive with China on large-scale photovoltaic deployment, a decentralized, energy-independent, zero-fuel-costs sovereign power source that is vital for national security. Plus, it carefully zeroes in on specific stretches of desert that are ideally suited to produce more clean electrons to reduce air pollution without harming local ecosystems. We need it.
Tell Congress to support the U.S. Western Solar Plan!
