Explainer: How China’s renewables rollout boosts its ‘war on sand’
China’s effort to build large solar power “bases” in and around the desert is a major part of its current renewable plan.
What is less known is that the initiative – which has expanded rapidly in the country’s arid north and northwest – is also a part of China’s campaign to combat desertification, an issue increasingly exacerbated by climate change.
For more than four decades, Beijing has been trying to prevent sand from degrading its land and forming dust storms with an afforestation programme called the “Three-North Shelterbelt” (三北防护林).
Over the past two years, the programme – described as China’s “war on sand” by the media – has been boosted by the development of large-scale solar bases in far-flung regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.
Installing solar panels in the desert can not only generate power, but also help prevent sand dunes from moving, according to Dr He Jijiang, executive deputy director of the Research Center for Energy Transition and Social Development at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
Energy companies’ investments also provide financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns – an apparent obstacle in the past – Dr He tells Carbon Brief at a side event in the China pavilion at the ongoing 16th session of the conference of parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
§ Taming of the sand
China is one of the worst-hit countries by desertification, which essentially means land degradation in dry lands. When land degrades, it becomes less healthy and productive.
Nearly 18% of China’s landmass – roughly seven times the size of the UK – is affected by the issue, according to statistics reported by Guan Zhi’ou, director of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration and the head of the Chinese delegation to COP16, in November.
China’s effort to combat desertification has a strong link with its – and the world’s – climate actions.
Soil is the second largest natural carbon sink on Earth after oceans and stores a large amount of carbon. When land degrades, not only does it lose the ability to store as much carbon, it can also release carbon into the atmosphere, driving further climate change.
On the other hand, climate change accelerates land degradation and China is on the front line. The country has seen the largest total area shift from non-dryland into drylands over the past three decades, according to a major scientific report published by the UNCCD at COP16. This means more parts of China are now prone to land degradation.
Since the introduction of the Three-North Shelterbelt programme in 1978, China has adopted a series of measures to fight desertification, from planting sand-blocking vegetation to laying straw on the ground in the shape of checkerboards to prevent its vast deserts from expanding. These solutions have enabled the country to protect about 360,000km2 of desertified land and to rehabilitate 79,000km2 of it, Guan said.
The ancient Chinese people built the Great Wall and Beijing now intends to build a “Green Great Wall”. According to the plan, the Three-North programme will see a total of 350,000km2 of trees planted in northern regions over the space of 73 years – until 2050 – to block out dust storms, stabilise the soil and improve land fertility.
Research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that emissions averaging 213m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent were absorbed by forest, land and the environment every year between 1980 and 2015, due to the Three-North Shelterbelt programme, according to a release published by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
§ Solar solution
China’s plan for renewable energy from 2021 to 2025 calls for the “large-scale development” of its sand-plus-solar anti-desertification method, a concept Beijing started promoting around two years ago.
The concept centres around managing arid areas via building and maintaining solar farms. It stems from years of experience accumulated by Chinese solar developers, which have built solar farms in the desert for more than a decade – with varying degrees of success.
“Building solar farms needs a lot of space. China has vast deserts, so [companies] wanted to take advantage of it,” Dr He explains.
But to operate solar farms in such harsh conditions, these companies must first take various protective measures – and these measures helped combat desertification, too.
For example, companies need to put up fences around their solar farms to stop animals from entering, install anti-dust nets to prevent sand from gathering on equipment and make straw checkerboards around their bases to prevent nearby sand dunes from shifting, Dr He says.
Solar panels also bring benefits to the ground underneath. For example, they can reduce water evaporation by blocking out direct sunshine, according to Dr Chen Siyu, a professor at the college of atmospheric sciences at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, a city situated on the edge of the Gobi desert in China.
Solar panels can “significantly increase” the soil moisture of dry regions and, therefore, help plants to grow, Dr Chen tells Carbon Brief. A 2021 study conducted in northwest China projected that the soil moisture would increase by up to 113.6% when it is sheltered.
“Solar panels can also form a natural barrier, helping to shed wind speed and prevent dust storms from occurring and spreading,” she says.
§ Ramping up transition
The construction of solar farms also injects financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns, providing incentives for them to carry on, Dr He notes.
“In the past, planting trees only brought ecological benefits, not economic returns,” he says. “Now, if a company wants to build a solar power station, it needs to cover all related costs, from hiring equipment to growing plants.”
Ramping up the solar-plus-sand method can scale up China’s renewable deployment, as well as improving soil conditions by bringing greenery, vegetable plots and livestock to the desert and barren land. Because of this, dryland has become “a type of resource”, Dr He says.
The Chinese government has been pushing the concept as a way to upscale the development of desert-based solar.
But there are concerns over whether the country’s grid is ready to transport such a large amount of solar power from remote areas to big cities on the eastern coast thousands of kilometres away.
Dr He recognises the challenge. “We don’t have enough long-distance transmission lines, but we are building many,” he says.
A shorter version of this article appeared in Carbon Brief’s China Briefing newsletter on 12 December 2024.