Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar power plants added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of about 100 every second.

Large-scale construction is taking place across the country, from crowded eastern cities with rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts, where giant wind farms dot the landscape.

“From the ground, it is difficult to understand the scale of these power plants,” said Chinese photographer Weimin Chu. “But when you get up in the air, you can see the geometry, the rhythm – and their connection with the mountains, the desert, the ocean.”

Chu has spent three years capturing the ongoing change by using drones to photograph power plants from overhead. His work, which draws from the visual language of traditional Chinese ink paintings, was displayed in an award-winning exhibition presented by Greenpeace last year. A selection of those photographs are reproduced here.

“I started just shooting landscapes,” Chu said. “But when I traveled to places like Guizhou, Yunnan and Qinghai in 2022, I kept seeing wind farms and solar power plants in my camera frame. I realized that this is the story of our times – and almost no one is documenting it in a systematic way.”