How the development of solar and wind farms on the Tibetan Plateau is affecting local communities

China is building some of the world’s largest solar farms on the Tibetan Plateau, where nomadic people have grazed herds of animals for millennia.

It’s not the first time Tibetan regions have become a major source of renewable energy in China. Since the mid-1990s, many Tibetan communities have lived alongside hydropower stations.

Now, with vast open landscapes and high elevations that provide ideal conditions for harnessing solar and wind energy, many pastoral lands have become key sites for large-scale renewable energy projects.

As part of my ethnographic research, I spoke to number of people in this area, offering a rare look at how large-scale energy development is affecting nomadic communities.

Herding yaks on solar farms

I spent time in a nomadic community located about 100 miles (161 km) southeast of Xining city, the capital of Qinghai province.

Beginning in 2017 and accelerating more recently, regional subsidiaries of energy companies such as PowerChina have built three solar panel power plants – enough to generate about 1 gigawatt of power – and a dozen wind turbines on the area’s open grasslands.

Sandy, desert-type land is well known to be suitable for solar and wind farms. Yet the grasslands and many other pastoral areas turned into solar farms are not sandy deserts. They are productive grazing land where Tibetans have herded yaks and sheep for generations.

Parts of what was once open fine alpine grassland, which Tibetans call pangtang where herders moved freely and gazed across the boundless horizon, are now covered by dense rows of solar panels. It remains unclear how these sites comply with China’s grassland conservation regulations. Other solar projects elsewhere in China have reportedly been investigated for environmental violations.

Walking through the sites feels like moving through a dense forest of iron pillars rising into the air. “It is easy to get lost in this jungle of solar panels,” Tsering, a local observer, told me as we walked between long rows of panels on a windy winter day in 2023.

That day, I also met Dolma, a local Dokpa, or nomad, herding yaks under solar panels. As we talked, she told me the solar farm had changed the experience of herding. She said, “I am used to herding on open grassland. So, herding under these glass panels feels like something is wrapping around my head. It feels very depressing.”

Individual and collective tensions

These energy projects in nomadic communities are presented as part of of national efforts to modernize rural areas, bring capital to local communities and promote renewable energy development as part of China’s clean energy and carbon reduction agenda.

But their implementation brings tensions and contradictions in the communities where they are located.

Based on my conversations with more than 20 people in the community, some view them as good economic opportunities and are envious of those whose grazing lands were selected for lease. Others oppose them, saying they “open the gate” for outsiders to appropriate local land for short-term financial gain by a few.

As more outsiders move in and the landscape changes with these energy projects, the overall concern that I observed from talking to different people is that the land that generations have lived on and protected may not retain the same sense of home in the future.

Tsering, who guided me through the solar farms, is very critical of those who agreed to lease land to solar farms, saying, “I may sound pretentious, but these days people are like grass growing on a wall – easily swayed by the slightest breeze of money.”

Since the 1950s, all land in China has been either government-owned or collectively owned; private land ownership is not allowed. Individuals may hold fixed-term “land-use rights” that can be transferred, sold or leased. In the 2000s, the government allocated land to individual families in nomadic areas of Qinghai and granted them 50-year “grassland use certificates.”This enables the locals to raise livestock on the land and lease it to others. Most certificates are set to expire in 2050.

Some holders of grassland use certificates have leased their land to energy farms. In the area I studied, those leases typically are for around 25 years, to align with the remaining term of local grassland use rights. What will happen when these land use rights expire remains unknown.

Money matters

In practice, leasing is extremely complex. When I asked a dozen families about their official contracts with the energy companies, several people said they signed it without fully understanding what it said.

“The only thing people made sure to know is how much money they are receiving,” one person said to me. The documents included long and complicated legal or technical language in Chinese, some of which was orally translated into Tibetan during the signing, because many nomads who are heads of households and more than 40 years old can’t read either Chinese or Tibetan.

Negotiations and leasing decisions are often carried out between company representatives and a small number of heads of households, brought together with the help of local officials. That leaves many residents uninformed about the terms and conditions of the agreements.

Households that lease grazing land to energy projects receive a one-time payment that depends on the amount of land involved and which company is seeking the lease. From 2017 to 2026, residents have told me they received offers between 3,000 and 4,000 yuan (US$440 to $587) for each mu, a unit of area equivalent to about 0.16 acres. Those rates have resulted in payments between 40,000 and 100,0000 yuan ($7,300 to $147,000) per household.

Human relations with the land

The energy companies’ contracts treat local households and land as individually owned properties in financial transactions. But local Indigenous communities have a different understanding and relationship to the environment.

Socially and historically, and regardless of the government policies on land ownership, Tibetans have perceived pastoral land as communal and experienced it as inhabited by all kinds of beings besides humans, including deities, animals, insects and other visible and invisible beings that are important in the Tibetan cosmological worldview. The energy planners often disregard these local ways of understanding and relating to the land.

During a dinner conversation, four local residents told me about one of these deeper spiritual concerns. During the construction of transmission lines to carry the solar power to users, they said, several transmission poles were placed very close to a labtse of a neighboring community. A labtse is a sacred site where an important mountain deity is believed to reside and where community members make regular offerings.

When locals asked for the poles to be moved, the energy developers suggested they would cover the cost of relocating the labtse instead – which, culturally, cannot be done, and if it were would require direction from high-ranking religious figures.

For the local people, however, this was not a matter of compensation but of protecting the deity from being stabbed by the giant poles. Some residents were even willing to pay the planners to move the poles. After a series of negotiations, the poles were eventually moved a short distance from the labtse.

Living alongside energy farms

Herding on energy farms comes with new challenges.

When the solar panels were installed, excavation for support posts and underground cables disturbed the topsoil and destroyed the native grasses, which consist of a diverse species of grass. According to people involved in the work, the replacement grasses consisted of only one or two dominant species among the several that were common in the local ecosystem. And the seeds used for restoration came from beyond the local area, so residents are unsure whether the replanted grasses are exactly the same as the types that grow locally.

During winter, snow under the shade of solar panels takes a long time to melt, causing baby lambs to freeze in the cold. Dolma also told me, “The solar panels are making a fortune for the wild fox because it is hard to see them when they attack little lambs under the panels.”

Dolma told me that when the wind turbines were being built, their noise frightened her livestock and carried across the valley, disturbing neighbors during windy times.

The locals also told me that wind blowing through the posts and wires of solar farms produces persistent and unsettling noises that disturb both animals and people.

Future uncertainties

While these solar farms are generally considered “renewable” and part of “sustainable development,” their future remains uncertain. Locals told me they do not know whether the land-lease contracts will be renewed or abandoned when they expire in about 25 years. Solar panels also last around 25 years, and local people wonder how the waste will be disposed of.

As more Indigenous communities around the world become locations for climate mitigation projects, energy production and data centers, the stories of local people are essential to understand how their ways of life, culture and environment are affected by these new interventions.