For centuries, people along China’s rivers and coasts lashed bamboo together and trusted one of nature’s lightest building materials to keep them above the water. Bamboo rafts and boats were simple, cheap and remarkably buoyant — but they also had obvious weaknesses. They could leak, loosen and deteriorate, making them poorly suited to the kind of punishment demanded of modern marine vessels.
Now Chinese engineers are taking bamboo back to sea, this time in a form those early boat builders would scarcely recognize.
Off the coast of Yantai, in Shandong Province, a 100-kilowatt solar platform called Jilin-2 floats on tubes made partly from engineered bamboo and wood fibers. Instead of the steel and high-density polyethylene normally used to support floating solar farms, its developers have turned bamboo into a reinforced composite designed to resist salt spray, corrosion, ultraviolet radiation and constant exposure to water.
“Compared to conventional steel or [high-density polythene] structures, the bamboo-based design significantly reduces marine environmental impact,” CIMC Raffles said, according to the South China Morning Post.
Developed by the CIMC Offshore Engineering Research Institute, China Forestry Group Corporation and Beijing Forestry University, Jilin-2 will supply electricity to a demonstration facility producing hydrogen, ammonia and methanol. But its more consequential mission may be simply to survive. Researchers will watch the structure for fatigue, water damage and deterioration to determine whether a plant-based material that once carried people across rivers could eventually help carry industrial-scale renewable energy at sea.
This Is Not a Raft Made of Bamboo Poles
Jilin-2 uses third-generation “bamboo-wound” tubes along with a material called Sea Bamboo Pipe, which the developers describe as a prestressed, fiber-reinforced wood-bamboo composite. The tubes provide both buoyancy and structural support.
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In other words, the humble bamboo has been transformed into an engineering material that is suitable for modern use. Fibers or strips are combined with resins and other components to make pipe-like structures designed to be light and strong. Beijing Forestry University professor Qi Chusheng told China Green Times that the wood and bamboo materials had been modified to withstand high humidity, corrosion, salt spray and ultraviolet radiation.
Previously, a 2019 study of bamboo-winding composite pipes found that the structures could combine relatively low weight with considerable stiffness and deform substantially before breaking. A subsequent 2025 study found similarly high toughness in large-diameter bamboo composite pipes subjected to compression.
The Challenge of Water
Still, water exposure is exactly where bio-based composites become vulnerable. A 2022 durability study described bamboo as moisture-sensitive and found that keeping water from penetrating the composite was crucial. Once moisture entered the pipe wall, it was difficult to remove.
That makes Jilin-2’s marine trial especially important. Developers plan to watch how the structure handles environmental exposure and fatigue, the gradual damage caused when waves and wind bend and flex a material thousands or millions of times.
Most floating solar plants have been built on relatively sheltered lakes and reservoirs. Taking the technology offshore is much harder. A 2025 review of sea-based floating solar systems identified waves, structural fatigue, corrosion, biofouling and mooring as some of the major problems engineers must solve before offshore floating solar can become routine.
Scaling Solar Out to Sea Is Already Massive for China
The bamboo platform is tiny beside the offshore solar projects now appearing along China’s coast.
In December 2025, CHN Energy announced that its 1-gigawatt Kenli Offshore PV Project in Dongying, also in Shandong, had reached full grid connection. The company describes it as the world’s largest open-sea offshore photovoltaic project. Its 2,934 solar platforms occupy about 1,223 hectares of sea.
Offshore solar opens enormous areas for electricity generation without directly competing for land, but every array needs floats, frames, anchors, cables and connections strong enough to endure the sea.
If some of those structures could be made from a fast-growing biological material rather than steel or fossil-fuel-derived plastic, their environmental footprint could potentially fall.
But bamboo does not automatically mean environmentally friendly. Engineered composites can contain resins, coatings and other manufactured ingredients, while their overall impact depends on how they are produced, how long they survive and what happens when they reach the end of their lives.
A 2019 life-cycle analysis published in the Journal of Cleaner Production compared bamboo-winding composite water pipes with conventional PVC pipes and found substantially lower environmental impacts for bamboo across most measures. The bamboo pipes also required less cumulative energy over their life cycle. But an underground water pipe and an offshore solar platform face very different demands, so those results cannot tell us how Jilin-2 will perform — or what its full environmental footprint will look like after years at sea.
Bamboo Has Become Part of a National Materials Push
China sure loves its bamboo. The floating solar farm is just the latest in a Chinese push for more bamboo as a sustainable alternative.
In 2023, China introduced a national three-year action plan to promote “bamboo instead of plastic,” explicitly targeting industrial production and construction as well as everyday consumer products. The Chinese government’s bamboo substitution plan explicitly calls for expanding the variety, scale, and commercial use of bamboo alternatives.
That policy has since become more permanent. In 2026, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration said bamboo-for-plastic substitution had been incorporated into China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, moving it from a short-term initiative toward a longer-term industrial strategy.
Jilin-2 pushes that idea into an unusually demanding setting. If its tubes remain strong, watertight and stable over time, developers envision similar materials appearing in offshore power facilities, marine energy islands and marine ranches used for aquaculture and ecosystem management.
The partners say their next step is a megawatt-scale bamboo platform.
Before that happens, however, Jilin-2 has a simpler job: stay afloat, stay strong and survive the sea. Bamboo has reached offshore energy. Now the ocean gets to decide whether it belongs there.
