China is installing solar panels on the retaining walls of its mountain highways — turning the vertical concrete surfaces that hold up its most dramatic road infrastructure into distributed clean electricity generators.

 

China is installing solar panels on the retaining walls of its mountain highways — turning the vertical concrete surfaces that hold up its most dramatic road infrastructure into distributed clean electricity generators.

China's mountain highway network is an engineering marvel — thousands of kilometres of road carved through the Himalayas, the Qinling, the Tianshan, and the karst mountains of Guangxi and Guizhou, supported by retaining walls, viaducts, and tunnel portals that collectively represent enormous concrete surfaces exposed to sunlight for the majority of each day. These surfaces have historically served only a structural function. A new generation of thin-film flexible solar panel technology — panels that can be bonded directly to curved and vertical concrete surfaces without the rigid mounting frames that conventional panels require — is transforming retaining walls into electricity generators.

The Guizhou Provincial Highway Administration has pioneered wall-mounted thin-film solar deployment on the retaining walls of the Guiyang-Bijie Expressway — a dramatic mountain highway crossing the karst plateau of southwest China. Flexible CIGS thin-film solar panels bonded to the south-facing retaining walls along a 15-kilometre test section generate electricity that powers the road's tunnel lighting, emergency communication systems, and motorway service area electrical supply. The installation requires no additional land, no separate mounting infrastructure, and no reduction in the structural function of the retaining walls.

The China Road and Bridge Corporation has estimated the total south-facing retaining wall surface area on China's national expressway network at over 200 million square metres — an area equivalent to 20,000 hectares of conventional solar farm development. At modest thin-film panel efficiency, this represents a potential of 15 to 20 GW of distributed highway infrastructure solar — accessible without any additional land acquisition or planning process.

China's mountains are becoming its solar panels. The walls were always facing south.

Source: China Road and Bridge Corporation & National Energy Administration (NEA), 2024

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