And high-voltage power lines carry this electricity to businesses and homes more than 1500km away.
The intention is to harness the region’s bright sunshine, cold temperatures and sky-touching altitude to power the plateau and beyond, including data centres used in China’s artificial intelligence development.
While China still burns as much coal as the rest of the world combined, last month President Xi Jinping promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and expand renewable energy by sixfold in the coming years.
A big part of that effort is in sparsely inhabited Qinghai, a province in western China in a region known among the Tibetans as Amdo.
I came as part of a government-organised media tour of clean-energy sites in Qinghai, which usually bars foreign journalists to hide dissent by its large ethnic Tibetan population. The New York Times paid for my travel.
A huge effort
China is not the first country to experiment with high-altitude clean energy. Other places — in Switzerland and Chile, for instance — are mountainous and steep.
Qinghai, slightly bigger than France, is mostly flat. That’s perfect for solar panels and the roads needed to bring them in.
And the cold air improves the panels’ efficiency. The ones in Qinghai could run every household in Chicago. And China is building more, including panels at 5000m.
The main group of solar farms, known as the Talatan Solar Park, dwarfs every other cluster of solar farms in the world.
It covers 420sqkm in Gonghe County, an alpine desert.
Electricity from solar and wind power in Qinghai (the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, now in exile) costs about 40% less than coal-fired power.
As a result, several electricity-intensive industries are moving to the region.
One type of plant turns quartzite from mines into polysilicon to make solar panels.
And Qinghai plans to quintuple the number of data centres in the province.
At this altitude, they consume 40% less electricity than centres at sea level because they barely need air-conditioning. Air warmed by the servers is piped away to heat other buildings.
Where sheep roam
As an incentive to build solar farms, many western Chinese provinces initially offered free land to companies.
When the Talatan solar project installed its first panels in 2012, they were low to the ground.
Ethnic Tibetan herders use the region’s sparse vegetation to graze their sheep, but the animals had trouble getting to the grass. Now, installers place the panels on higher mountings.
Dislocating people for power projects is politically sensitive all over the world. But high-altitude projects affect relatively few people.
China pushed more than a million people out of their homes in west-central China a quarter of a century ago and flooded a vast area for the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam.
This year, China has been installing enough solar panels every three weeks to match the power-generation capacity of that dam.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Katrin Bennhold
Photograph by: The New York Times
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