Picture of the Week: Wind Power

Wind Farm Outside Urumqi

If you ever find yourself entering or exiting Urumqi by either train or bus you’re bound to see the following scene - hundreds of white wind turbines dotting the landscape, somehow harnessing vast amounts of energy to be used by the nearby capital. It really is a cool sight, especially with the TianShan mountains in the background. Don’t let this picture fool you, though. These things are not small. It takes an entire 18-wheeler to transport a single blade of a turbine from the manufacturing plant to the wind farm.

Xinjiang’s weather, in some places reliably windy and other continuously sunny, makes it the perfect place to harvest solar and wind energy. Some villages I have visited in the far reaches of the province’s borders acquire most of their electricity by either a wind turbine, solar panels on the roof or both.

Can Xinjiang continue this trend towards green energy? If you walk around Urumqi too much you might think not, but I still hold hope for the rest of the province.