A Chinese state-owned company said on Monday it had connected the world's largest solar plant to the grid in northwest Xinjiang.
The 5-gigawatt (GW), 200,000-acre solar farm, in a desert area of the capital Urumqi, went into operation on Monday, according to a notice on the state asset regulator's website, citing China's Power Construction Corp.
The facility will generate around 6.09 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year. That would be enough to feed the country of Papua New Guinea for a year.
The two largest previously operational solar facilities were also in western China: Longyuan Power Group's Ningxia Tenggeli desert solar project and China Lüfa Qinghai New Energy's Golmud Wutummeiren solar complex, both with a capacity of 3 GW, according to the Global Energy Monitor solar energy tracker.
Sparsely populated and rich in solar and wind resources, Xinjiang has become a hub for huge renewable energy bases that send much of their power over long distances to China's densely populated eastern coast.
