Construction starts at triple-tower CSP in China
Source: CSTA
With warmer weather, excavation work begun in December, resumed at SUPCON Solar’s 350MW concentrated solar power (CSP) project in Delingha, Qinghai Province. Foundation excavation for the first of its three solar receiver towers is now complete. (Multi-tower CSP was one of the NEA award winners for scientific innovation in China.)
Crews will now focus on the first tower’s main structure, the power block plant building roof, the molten salt storage tanks, and heliostat field column installation.
The project is one of Qinghai Province’s first batch of designated Gen-3 CSP demonstration projects. This first triple-tower CSP in China innovates ‘low-position’ thermal energy storage tanks designed to prevent the leaks that have been an engineering problem in previous CSP projects. (Supcon is a former winner of the SolarPACES Technology Innovation Awards: for its innovative heliostat washing machine)
Developer Zhejiang Zhongguang New Energy Technology has committed around 5.567 billion yuan to build it. With 14 hours of energy storage, the plant is projected to generate enough electricity for roughly half a million households.
As with CSP with thermal energy storage in other giant renewable energy parks being built in China, CSP firms up much larger PV capacity on-site, enabling dispatchable generation day and night from renewables alone.
Its feasibility study was approved on March 21, 2025, and construction started at year’s end.
Qinghai Province has set a guaranteed grid price of 0.55 yuan/kWh for CSP projects in its 2024–2028 demonstration plan, with no requirement to participate in market trading, giving developers certainty.
Like Qinghai’s other 350MW three-tower CSP project beginning in nearby Golmud, design responsibilities were split between these two institutes:
• Northwest Electric Power Design Institute (NEPDI) via China Power Engineering Consulting Group (CPECC) handles multi-tower and mirror field layout, heat absorption towers and systems, distributed molten salt storage, multi-module scheduling, and long-distance molten salt transport.
• Northwest China Electrical Power Test Research Institute, via China Energy Engineering Group (CEEG) covers heat storage and heat exchange, power generation units, and auxiliary systems.
