In the northwest of China, in the province of Qinghai, the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant is to be built.
In the northwest of China, in the province of Qinghai, the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant is to be built. The solar thermal power project Delingha will cover about 25 km² and consist of six CSP towers with a capacity of 135 MW each.
The Huanghe Qinghai Delingha project is China’s first commercial scale CSP project which includes a storage system. The project will be developed by BrightSource (link is external), the company that also realized the Ivanpah project in California, currently the largest CSP plant with a capacity of 377 MW.
In the first phase of the Delingha project, two solar towers with a capacity of 135 MW each will be built on an area of about 13 km². Those two towers will have a storage unit using molten salt to store up thermal energy for 3.5 hours of electricity production. The towers are expected to produce nearly 600,000 MWh of electricity per year which will be fed to the regional branch of the State Grid Corporation of China and supply more than 452,000 Chinese residences. Construction for the first phase is scheduled to start in 2015 and end in 2017.
