Thursday
November 05, 2026
Life has become unexpectedly easier and more lucrative for some shepherds on the world’s highest plateau after China began carpeting the area with solar panels as part of a drive to diversify its energy mix.
“It has made grazing much easier for us,” said Li Yonglin, 25, one of those allowed to freely graze their sheep in a fenced solar park in Gonghe, a county in the northwestern province of Qinghai.
“In the morning, we simply open the gate to the sheep pen and don’t really need to look after them. They come back on their own in the evening, and we just pen them up.”
Li estimated that the new approach had boosted his earnings to 50,000 yuan to 60,000 yuan ($7,496.14 to $8,995.37), compared with 10,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan when he followed traditional grazing practices.
By July this year, state media said, 6,330 households in five townships had benefited from 56 grazing sites in Hainan, a culturally Tibetan area that encompasses Gonghe. However, it did not disclose how many households had been granted grazing access.
Higher incomes but traditions at risk
Such early signs suggest China’s projects, sprawling across hundreds of acres on the vast Qinghai-Tibet plateau, are boosting incomes for some, although researchers and others warn they are also eroding traditional ways of life.
One study estimated that the region, sometimes called “the roof of the world”, where nomadic communities have grazed livestock for millennia, holds almost half of China’s solar energy potential, making it a focal point for renewable energy efforts.
Solar overtook coal in July as the country’s largest source of installed power capacity, and authorities plan to expand wind and solar power generation by a further 53% over the next five years.
The complex Li visits, spanning 148,000 acres (60,000 hectares), uses grazing sheep to reduce mowing costs, said Cao Jun, a safety supervisor for a State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) project in Hainan.
It leads to a “win-win situation”, he told Reuters, with electricity generated by the plant sent nationwide to cities such as Beijing, the capital, and Shanghai, the commercial hub.
But the integration of livestock and solar infrastructure has not been universally welcomed.
Researchers say solar projects are transforming life on the plateau, where thousands of Tibetan nomads were resettled in rural townships in the early 2000s as the government sought to reverse ecological degradation.
“You can find some places (to graze) around the solar panels, but these are not suitable for nomads and shepherds to sustain their livelihoods,” said researcher Tsewang Dorji at the Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamsala, a hill town in India.
Plateau dwellers have little say in the conversion of pastures into solar power projects, said a researcher studying environmental conservation and new energy infrastructure in the region.
Projects fragment once-open grazing space
Such installations fragment previously open grazing lands, making it harder for herders to watch over their livestock, added the researcher, who sought anonymity to protect collaborators.
Sheep from 16 households were allowed to graze in a solar park for part of the year, the government in Gonghe said in 2024.
A small number of nomads were “tokenistically employed to graze sheep”, but goats and yaks were generally excluded, said Mandie McKeown, advocacy director at the UK-based environmental charity Foundation for Gaia.
Evidence shows “this isn’t pastoralism as it’s traditionally been practised”, McKeown told Reuters.
Wind rattling through solar farm posts and wires produced “persistent and unsettling” sounds that disturbed both people and animals, anthropology researcher Sanggay Tashi at the University of Colorado Boulder said in an article in June, citing people in Qinghai.
Online government records from 2017 showed an undated complaint alleging that Gonghe’s photovoltaic power stations had damaged grasslands, leaving sheep and cattle with little grass to eat.
The records, which cited Hainan as the administrative region for the case without identifying the complainant, said an investigation found no truth in the allegation, while adding that grazing was not permitted in the area.
Authorities in Qinghai did not respond to requests for comment.
Not everyone in Gonghe is complaining, though.
“Life has changed tremendously,” said another shepherd, Wen Yujun, who can now manage a herd of 700 to 800 largely on his own.
“I never could have imagined it before,” added the 43-year-old, who estimated that his annual income had risen eight-fold to about 80,000 yuan.
($1 = 6.6701 Chinese yuan renminbi)
China / Solar
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