We have all been coping with COVID and being stuck indoors in different ways. Those of you who know me will not be shocked that I have ended up doing a lot of map projects. One of these is mapping every windmill in Shandong province I could find. 1/7

I started this project because I've wanted to better understand energy production in general in China but especially green energy. Xi Jinping has pledged China to ambitious carbon emissions goals, and there has been a serious effort to switch to natural gas. 2/7

At the same time I've been seeing huge numbers of windmills all over the country. Shandong offers a good case study because it has high energy needs (100 million people in an area just a little larger than Georgia - [the state]) 3/7

It also has a lot of wind potential: an estimated 67 GW according to a statistic that shows up frequently in Chinese articles. A lot of the the construction appears to have fallen under the 13th FYP goals, which included target of 6GW by 2020 and 12.5GW by 2030. 4/7

In all I found 2,805 windmills, with a few different designs using blades ~20-40m long. Not sure how to calculate the total installed capacity, and this is sure to rise anyway as offshore wind projects get underway. 5/7

I'm mapping out the rest of Shandong's major electrical grid and other power generation sources and plan to eventually put those out, along with other thematic maps such as these (6/7):

China is hard to understand on a good day, but I find looking at it a province at a time and digging into the data--especially places like Shandong & Guangdong that have huge populations or GDPs even viewed in isolation--to be incredibly helpful. 7/7

Looking for windmills also forces you to slow down and think about what you are looking at - I set up tracks and systematically followed east to west across Shandong. Found some neat stuff that way (in no particular order): Aerostat tether/base 8/?

Also due to updated imagery I noticed my 'favorite' SAM site - an HQ-2 unit located on an island between the Bohai and Yellow Sea is gone. It had been there since at least 1974.. 9/n

A synthetic impulse aperture radar and elevated platform for some other kind of radar next to one of the ubiquitous windmills in this part of Shandong

I'll stop for now but wanted to end with noting that Shandong is also really pretty. I enjoyed this project a lot because it involved getting to know a really diverse and interesting landscape better than I would otherwise.

One more I spotted in Shandong - not sure if this a JY-27 or similar. Been mapping the national network of similar radars - most have been in the same spots since the mid-70s. Also: I have a real soft spot for the old line drawings that sometimes come up researching these: