Visiting the world's largest floating solar plant
On the reservoir of an old coal mine, a Chinese company built a floating solar plant of superlatives.
On the reservoir of an old coal mine, a Chinese company built a floating solar plant of superlatives. Handelsblatt correspondent Stephan Scheuer visited the site by boat.
Background
The plant visited here in Huainan in Anhui province was, at 40 megawatts, the world's largest floating solar farm in 2017 – built on a flooded former open-pit coal mine. The motif was doubly striking: on land destroyed by the extraction of fossil energy, renewable power generation now stands.
The plant illustrates China's paradoxical handling of fossil and renewable energy. The country is by far the world's largest CO₂ emitter and continues to add coal-fired power plants. At the same time, no state installs as much renewable capacity as China. In 2023, the People's Republic added around 216 gigawatts of solar capacity – more than the world's total solar capacity in 2016.
In manufacturing, the dominance is even clearer: more than 80 percent of the world's solar modules are produced in China. Manufacturers such as Longi, Trina Solar and Jinko Solar have systematically undercut international competition over the years – supported by state subsidies, cheap loans and an immense home market. European manufacturers like Meyer Burger or SolarWorld have largely succumbed to this price pressure over the past ten years.
The consequences reach into current politics. Since 2024 the European Commission has been investigating whether Chinese solar manufacturers benefit from improper subsidies; at the same time the German solar industry is warning about imports from Xinjiang, where forced labour has been documented. The balance between climate protection (cheap rollout) and industrial sovereignty (own production) has become one of Europe's hardest energy questions.
For Huainan and the region: the plant from this report has since been overtaken by several larger floating solar farms worldwide – above all in India, Thailand and China itself. The principle, however – solar plants on former industrial sites and water reservoirs – has established itself as one of the most cost-effective forms of solar build-out.