OPINION | Make no mistake, Tibet’s solar farms buildout is grey zone warfare

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The spatial pattern of renewable energy installations across Tibet tells a story that goes well beyond China’s carbon neutrality ambition. India should be paying closer attention

Thirty-five kilometres from Sikkim. Three kilometres from a military listening post in Gar County, western Tibet. Adjacent to a radar station overlooking Pangong Tso. These are not coordinates from a defence briefing. They are the locations of Chinese solar farms in Tibet, operational and expanding.

At 5,200 metres, China has commissioned the world’s highest photovoltaic station, generating 150 megawatts from panels engineered to work where most equipment fails. What looks on paper like a renewable energy programme looks on a map like something else entirely.

Tibet, China’s roof-top solar farm

Tibet now hosts over 200 solar plants and farms of varying scales, according to recent geospatial research by the Takshashila Institution. The total installed solar capacity of projects above 20 MW alone stands at over 9,300 MW, with 74 operational and 20 more to come. In 2025 itself, the region added 2,600 MW from just two projects.

Lhasa, often called the “Sunshine City,” has become the epicentre of this activity, with over 100 documented solar installations. The region receives solar radiation between 5,852 and 8,400 MJ/m² per year, placing it alongside the Atacama and Sahara deserts as one of the sunniest places on Earth. China has clearly grasped what this means.

Messages from geographical locations

But the more revealing story lies not in capacity figures. It lies in the places where these installations have been placed. Satellite imagery and spatial analysis show that a significant number of solar projects are located near military airfields, listening posts, radar stations, highways, and railway lines.

Around Shigatse Peace Airport, a facility that began life as a military base in 1973, three solar farms covering nearly three square kilometres have come up since 2020. In Gar County, a 30 MW solar farm sits just three kilometres from a Circularly Disposed Antenna Array, a sophisticated military listening post with two rings of 11 antennas each. The farm was built from ground clearance to full operation in under three months. Near Pangong Tso, compact solar arrays have been installed within fenced compounds to power radar equipment on a militarised mountain slope.

China’s technological prowess overcomes natural challenges

What makes this expansion particularly significant is that China has systematically overcome the technical limitations that once made high-altitude solar power unreliable. Winter efficiency drops, UV damage to panels, snow accumulation, and the sheer remoteness of sites were all flagged as serious constraints. The response has been methodical. Newer projects deploy bifacial panels, AI-driven monitoring systems, grid-integrated battery storage, and thermal energy storage pits to counter seasonal variation.

Near Shigatse, a newly built solar farm features what appears to be a 100-metre-by-100-metre thermal energy storage reservoir, designed to store heat and address winter shortfalls. Battery storage units at sites like Mahang ensure an uninterrupted supply even when snow blankets the panels in December. These are not experimental fixes. They are operational solutions, deployed at scale, in some of the harshest conditions on the planet.

Why this is grey zone warfare

This is where the conversation must shift from energy policy to security. What China is doing in Tibet fits squarely within the definition of grey zone warfare: the use of tools and activities that fall below the threshold of conventional military conflict but steadily alter the strategic balance.

Renewable energy infrastructure, on its own, is not a weapon. But when solar farms are systematically co-located with military installations, when they enable year-round habitation in previously seasonal border settlements, when they power the expansion of permanent towns within striking distance of Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, and when the electricity they generate feeds into transmission corridors that could eventually supply other regions, the cumulative effect is strategic, not environmental.

For India, the implications are direct.

Neutralising India’s border infrastructure emphasis

Reliable, decentralised power at the border means China can sustain military and civilian presence at altitudes and in locations where logistics have historically been the binding constraint.

It means construction timelines collapse, as demonstrated by the Gar County solar farm built in under 90 days. It means the infrastructure is hardened against disruption, because solar and battery systems do not depend on fuel convoys across mountain passes.

And it means that India’s own border infrastructure, however much it has improved in recent years, is being matched and in some corridors overtaken by a build-out that draws its strength from something as ordinary as sunlight.

China’s solar installation should not be India’s’ blindspot

India’s policy establishment tends to discuss China’s activities in Tibet through the lens of hydropower and dam-building on the Yarlung Tsangpo. That concern is valid. But the solar expansion deserves equal, if not greater, scrutiny. It is quieter, faster, more dispersed, and harder to contest diplomatically.

Other than local communities who bear the environmental costs, it is not common for objects to be built when a country builds solar farms near a contested border. That is what makes it such an effective grey zone strategy. The panels are green. The intent, one suspects, is not.

(Nithiyanandam Yogeswaran is Professor & Head- Geospatial Research Programme, Takshashila Institution.)

Views expressed are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Courtsey To : Moneycontrol