Energies Media
A fishing boat heading out from the port of Dongying on a December morning in 2025 would have passed something that had never existed anywhere in the world before.
Eight kilometers offshore, where the Bohai Sea shallows meet the mudflats of the Shandong coast, the water had vanished beneath steel.
Not a ship, not a rig.
A solar farm the size of a small city, fixed to the ocean floor on thousands of steel platforms, had just been switched on.
The number it produced in that first moment of full operation had never been reached by any offshore solar structure on any sea, anywhere on earth.
That number is the whole story.
The Shandong Peninsula has fed China for centuries.
Its coastal shallows are nurseries for sea bream and crab, staging grounds for migratory shorebirds, and the economic engine of cities whose names rarely reach the western press.
Dongying sits where the Yellow River pushes into the sea, depositing sediment that builds new land every year.
The waters here are uncommonly shallow, rarely more than a few meters deep even well offshore.
That shallowness, unremarkable to deep sea engineers, turned out to be the precise quality that one project needed.
Piles can be driven, platforms can be anchored, and the sun, which hammers this coastline for roughly 2,600 hours a year, asks no permission.
The scale of construction that unfolded here through 2024 and into 2025 is almost impossible to hold in the mind at once.
Exactly 2,934 steel platforms were fabricated, towed out, and fixed to the seafloor on steel piles.
Each platform was a rigid island built to hold rows of solar panels and resist the swell of the Bohai Sea.
Onto those platforms, crews bolted more than 2.3 million individual solar panels.
The total footprint covered 1,223 hectares, roughly the area of 1,700 American football fields laid side by side.
The project cost approximately $1.2 billion to build.
And yet the number that mattered most still had not been spoken.
Building a solar farm on a reservoir is one challenge.
Building one on the open sea is something else entirely.
The platforms had to survive typhoon season conditions, maintain electrical continuity across thousands of fixed sections, and resist salt air far more aggressively than any inland installation ever faces.
The project used China’s first approved framework for three dimensional sea use rights, meaning the same parcel of water could legally host both the solar array above and continued marine use below.
Fishermen could still work the shallows between the platforms.
Power generated on water must reach the onshore grid without the losses that plague long submarine cable runs.
China Energy Investment Corporation connected its HG14 project to the grid in late December 2025, and the facility can produce 1 gigawatt of electricity, making it the largest offshore solar installation ever built on open sea.
One gigawatt is the output of a large nuclear reactor, enough to power roughly millions of urban residents in China.
Before HG14, the largest floating solar farms sat on inland lakes and reservoirs, sheltered from open ocean weather, rarely exceeding a few hundred megawatts.
The Three Gorges New Energy floating solar farm in Anhui Province was previously the world’s largest at 150 megawatts, built on a lake formed from a collapsed coal mining area.
HG14 is more than six times that size, and it sits on a living sea.
Ecologists watching solar infrastructure coexist with wildlife elsewhere have noted how panel arrays can create unintended shelter.
In other solar contexts, animals have surprised engineers by adapting to panel arrays in ways no blueprint anticipated.
China’s appetite for coastal solar is not satisfied by one project.
In 2025 alone, China installed 315 gigawatts of new solar capacity, lifting cumulative installed solar to 1.2 terawatts.
HG14 functions as a proof of concept for an entirely new category of power plant, one that turns shallow coastal waters into generation assets without consuming farmland or displacing households.
Long term monitoring of the seabed beneath the platforms, fish populations, and the flight paths of migrating birds will matter as much as the megawatt counter.
But on a December morning off Dongying, as the first full gigawatt of ocean born sunlight moved through submarine cables toward millions of homes on the Shandong plain, the fishing boats kept sailing.
The sea held both old and new at once, and neither had asked the other’s permission.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise and deep knowledge of the space industry. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise and deep knowledge of the space industry. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise and deep knowledge of the space industry. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.

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