On a high stretch of the Tibetan Plateau, in Qinghai’s Gonghe County, the ground has been covered with seven million solar panels. Talatan Solar Park is now the largest single solar installation on Earth, a field spanning 162 square miles.
The scale is hard to hold in the mind: the park covers seven times the area of Manhattan, and it is expected to grow once commercial operations begin in 2026, perhaps reaching ten times that footprint. It operates at about 16 gigawatts, enough power for roughly five million households.
Against this backdrop, the park is one piece of a much larger build. It was built in one go by Powerchina Hebei Electric Power Engineering, working with Datang Qinghai Energy Development, and it sits beside wind farms with 4,700 megawatts and hydro dams adding another 7,380 megawatts, all feeding one renewable hub.
The wider picture is a national target of 3,600 gigawatts of installed solar and wind, on the way to peaking emissions by 2030 and reaching zero carbon by 2060. Coal still supplied 52% of China’s energy, but that share is shrinking as the build-out quickens.
The electricity is meant to travel more than 1,000 miles over high-voltage lines to the cities of the east, where data centres and artificial intelligence now draw the country’s heaviest load.
There is a gentler detail, too. Sheep graze beneath the panels, trimming the vegetation, improving the soil, and supporting a local mutton brand, a small sign of how completely the landscape has been reworked.
Sources
- It's 7 times the size of Manhattan and will be even larger in 2026 — 7,000,000 solar panels aligned in China
- Largest solar farms in the world (2026) — what they mean
