China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) has put the world’s largest solar PV-plus-concentrated-solar hybrid into commercial trial operation in the Gobi Desert — and its headline trick is delivering power after sunset without a single lithium battery.
The 1-gigawatt Hami project in Xinjiang stores the sun’s energy as heat in molten salt, letting it keep generating for up to eight hours after dark.
How the plant works
The Hami complex pairs 900 MW of standard solar panels with a 100 MW concentrated solar power (CSP) unit built on 1,817 hectares of desert at the southern foot of the Tianshan mountains. Total investment was CNY 3.53 billion, or about $480 million.
During the day, the PV array feeds the grid at full load. The CSP unit does something different: 260,000 tracking mirrors covering 800,000 square meters of collector surface focus sunlight to heat molten salt to 550°C (1,022°F). That heat is stored, then used to produce steam and spin a turbine once the sun goes down.
