Two 650-foot-tall (200-m) towers have risen in China’s Gansu Province. Combined with an array of 30,000 mirrors arranged in concentric circles, the new facility is expected to generate over 1.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year.
While photovoltaic panels that directly convert sunlight to electricity are what most people think of when they hear the term “solar power,” there is another method of harvesting the Sun’s power that’s been steadily developing since the early 1980s. Known as solar thermal or concentrated solar power (CSP), these systems rely on mirrors known as heliostats to bounce sunlight to a central gathering point. There, the concentrated beams heat a transfer fluid that in turn heats a working fluid. This fluid then evaporates, turns a turbine, and generates electricity.
In 2014, what was then the world’s largest solar thermal power station opened in the Mojave Desert in the United States. Known as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the facility consists of three different towers surrounded by heliostat arrays and has a capacity of 392 megawatts. In 2017, Australia announced that it was building the world’s largest single-tower solar thermal power plant with a proposed output of 150 megawatts, although that project was ultimately killed in 2019. The world’s largest CSP, the Noor Complex Solar Power Plant, now operates in the Sahara Desert in Morocco where it churns out 510 megawatts of power.
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