One evening in late 2008, I was driving by Xinjiang’s Dabancheng district en route to Ürümqi from Turpan. The snow was getting lighter by now. Flanking me were rows of windmills, their rotors scattering snowflakes in an almost hypnotic performance that lasted for dozens of kilometers.

Dabancheng may be well-known in China thanks to The Girl from Dabancheng, a Uygur folk song made famous by the songwriter Wang Luobin, but the harsh climate here has made it an inhospitable place. Nonetheless, since the first windmills turned operational here in 1989, it has taken only two decades for Dabancheng to be developed into what is now the largest wind farm in China.

A Full-blown Danger
It was the abundance of this clean resource that led to the transformation of this no man’s land.

According to Yang Yongli, the head of the Xinjiang Wind Energy Institute, there are nine major wind production zones in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, of which Dabancheng is the most well endowed. “The nine wind production zones produce around 24 billion kilowatt-hours of usable wind energy, and our windmills have a power-generating capacity of around 80 million kilowatts,” said Yang. “That’s four and a half times the generating capacity of the Three Gorges Dam.”