Chinese solar giant LONGi Green Energy Technology (LONGi) and electric-vehicle maker NIO jointly built and put into operation an off-grid, solar-plus-energy-storage battery swap station at the Xingxingxia service area in Hami, Xinjiang, on September 23, 2026. The two companies describe it as the world's first "zero-carbon, off-grid solar-and-storage battery swap station" — a claim made by the companies themselves that has not been independently verified by a third party. The station is the first swap stop on the G30 Lianyungang-Horgos Expressway, China's longest expressway, as it enters Xinjiang. It runs entirely on solar power with no grid connection, providing round-the-clock battery swaps for NIO drivers.
The station's core equipment was supplied by LONGi, including a LONGi BLOCK mobile energy station and LONGi's H2D energy-storage system. The system automatically switches among three operating modes: during the day, solar panels generate power that both runs the station directly and charges the storage system; at night, the storage system discharges to keep the station running continuously; and if light is insufficient for an extended period — due to overcast skies or sandstorms — the system switches to an emergency mode that prioritizes power for critical functions such as battery swapping and lighting, so that drivers' swap needs are not disrupted. This "solar generation, storage regulation, intelligent switching" technical approach frees the station from dependence on an external grid, allowing it to run stably even in a desert area with no grid coverage.
Xingxingxia sits deep in the Gobi Desert, on the border between Xinjiang and Gansu, where natural conditions are extremely harsh: winds of force 8 or stronger blow on more than 100 days a year, summer ground temperatures can exceed 70 degrees Celsius, and extreme winter lows can fall to minus 30 degrees Celsius, making grid construction and maintenance difficult. Under a conventional approach, bringing stable grid power to the area would require stringing transmission lines across dozens of kilometers of Gobi desert, a project that would take a long time to build and require heavy investment. LONGi and NIO say it was precisely because of the area's weak grid coverage and the high cost and long timeline of conventional grid expansion that the two companies chose an off-grid solar-plus-storage technical approach, powering the swap station without any connection to the public grid — offering what they describe as a replicable solution for energy infrastructure in similar regions.
The Xingxingxia station is not a standalone project; it is one node on NIO's "Silk Road battery-swap corridor." That corridor runs 3,605 kilometers from Xi'an in Shaanxi province in the east to Horgos in Xinjiang in the west, with 33 swap stations along the route. It became fully connected on September 26, 2026, when NIO's 4,125th swap station, located at Sayram Lake in Xinjiang, came online. The corridor's completion also means that the G30 Lianyungang-Horgos Expressway — at 4,395 kilometers China's longest expressway — now has battery-swap coverage along its entire length, via 43 stations. NIO drivers can now swap batteries continuously from China's eastern coast, through the Hexi Corridor, into Xinjiang, and on to the Horgos border crossing with Central Asia, without range anxiety on the long route.
Around the time the Xingxingxia station opened, NIO's broader charging and swapping network was also expanding rapidly. According to public reports, as of mid-September 2026 NIO operated more than 4,000 battery swap stations, more than 5,000 charging stations and over 30,000 charging piles nationwide, and the company plans to raise its total number of swap stations to more than 4,600 by the end of 2026. NIO has said each swap station holds roughly 2,000 kilowatt-hours of battery reserve, meaning its thousands of stations together form an energy-storage capacity on the order of several gigawatt-hours — effectively, the company says, an "invisible storage power plant" distributed across the national highway network. By late September, NIO's network had provided drivers with more than 120 million cumulative battery swaps.
This is not the first collaboration between LONGi and NIO. Public records show the two companies signed a strategic cooperation agreement as early as January 2024, focused on combining photovoltaics with EV energy infrastructure to advance carbon neutrality in transportation. LONGi describes the Xingxingxia project as another new application of its solar-plus-storage business in transportation energy-supply scenarios, reflecting a broader shift among solar manufacturers from pure equipment makers toward integrated energy-system service providers. For NIO, the project marks the company's first operational trial of a fully off-grid battery swap station; the company has said the experience gained will support future expansion of its swap network into other areas with weak grid coverage.
The project is also seen as emblematic of China's continued leadership in solar and energy-storage technology. As one of the world's leading solar manufacturers, LONGi has repeatedly set world records for cell and module conversion efficiency in 2026: in January, the company's hybrid interdigitated back-contact (HIBC) silicon cell reached 28.04% efficiency; by April that had risen to 28.13%, with HIBC module efficiency, certified by a US national renewable-energy testing body, reaching 26.4%; in September, LONGi again raised its HIBC silicon-cell efficiency record to 28.29%, certified by Germany's Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin (ISFH) — the company's third such record of 2026. LONGi's crystalline-silicon/perovskite tandem cell efficiency also reached 35.5%, certified by the European Solar Test Installation (ESTI) in July. These technical breakthroughs are widely seen as reinforcing China's leading position in the global green-energy supply chain.
Analysts note that the significance of the Xingxingxia station lies not only in the single infrastructure project itself but also in the deepening industrial-chain cooperation between China's solar manufacturers and EV makers — with solar companies supplying generation and storage hardware and automakers supplying application scenarios and operating networks, together exploring ways to build energy infrastructure in areas with weak grid coverage. It should be noted, however, that the claim of being the "world's first zero-carbon, off-grid solar-and-storage battery swap station" currently comes mainly from official announcements by NIO and LONGi and coverage by partner media outlets; no independent international or academic body has verified this "world's first" status. Coverage of the project by official Chinese outlets, including China Daily, has likewise largely drawn on the companies' own announcements.