CHN Energy has connected the 3 GW Mengxi Lanhai solar facility to the grid after 14 months of construction. The project in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, required a total investment of approximately CNY 12 billion ($1.6 billion).

A large project with cost data.

At $1.6B project cost for 3gw, that is a little over 50c/watt, and would typically produce energy costs excluding financing of 1c/kwh.

  • Mihies
    3·
    1 month ago

    I wonder what they are doing with possible surplus of energy.

    • eleitl@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 month ago

      Interestingly enough, I have not heard of large hydrogen projects from water electrolysis in China.

    • humanspiral@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      1 month ago

      They’ve yet to deploy grid batteries at scale, afaik. While EVs are doing great in China (over 50% of sales), and V2G is active near term expected there, behind the meter batteries is always great for solar. It uses the transmission line at higher capacity including the possibility of reverse charging overnight for morning/cloudy next day power boost.

      Inner Mongolia includes a lot of desert, and so future expansions with batteries should have plenty of available land to boost existing transmission utilization.

      Overall, they’ve yet to announce climate goals representative of the pace of renewables/battery production that they have. They might not mind just replacing daytime use of coal, while ramping coal up at night instead of leveraging batteries that makes transmission much cheaper, and can easily beat coal prices during night only operation.