Departing from Hami City, Xinjiang, we venture into the vast Gobi Desert to explore the first batch of national solar thermal demonstration projects and Xinjiang's first solar thermal power station - the China Energy Construction Hami Molten Salt Tower 50000 kW Solar Thermal Power Generation Project. This giant glowing torch standing on the Gobi Desert once generated over 130 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, enough for 65000 households to use for an entire year. In the first year of the 15th Five Year Plan, a larger and more advanced super energy engineering base in Barkol, Hami is accelerating its landing.

14500 solar mirrors for tracking and power generation

The average annual power generation of the power station once exceeded 130 million kilowatt hours, enough for 65000 households to use for a whole year. 14500 sets of sun setting mirrors synchronize with sunflowers, gathering sunlight at the top of the tower and heating the molten salt inside to nearly 600 degrees. The high-temperature molten salt heats the water body, generating high-temperature steam to drive the generator to generate electricity. Excess hot salt is stored in a molten salt tank, which can generate electricity continuously for 13 hours even on cloudy days or late nights. To ensure power generation efficiency, more than 14500 heliostats in the entire site need to be thoroughly cleaned every 7 days.

Domestication breaks through the technological blockade

The hardware of the first generation solar thermal power station's sun setting mirror has been localized, but the supporting control software used to rely on foreign technology. In the early years, the cost of solar thermal power was five to six times that of photovoltaics, and overseas manufacturers strictly kept their core technologies confidential during the commissioning stage of imported equipment. After two years of equipment iteration and optimization, the power generation is expected to exceed 150 million kWh and reach a new high in 2026. The 50000 kW solar thermal project of China Energy Construction Hami has verified the technical feasibility of molten salt tower solar thermal power generation, supporting the development of Hami's solar thermal industry from demonstration to scale. Keywords: New energy news and information, solar thermal, photovoltaic

Accelerate the construction of super bases

In the first year of the 15th Five Year Plan, Hami Barikun is constructing the Hami Solar Thermal Storage Multi Energy Complementary Integrated Green Power Demonstration Project in Xinjiang, which is larger in scale and more advanced in technology. This 1.5 million kilowatt integrated solar thermal storage base is the second batch of Shagehuang new energy core projects in China and the largest single project of its kind in the world. Triple the scale of solar thermal power generation and coordinate with photovoltaic power generation; During the day, photovoltaic power is the main source of power supply, while solar thermal energy is combined with 8-hour energy storage to ensure power supply on rainy and cloudy days at night; The annual power generation has increased from 130 million kilowatt hours to 2.9 billion kilowatt hours. All new projects will use domestically produced equipment, and the first domestically developed intelligent monitoring platform with independent intellectual property rights for solar thermal power stations will be implemented here. The control system for the heliostat will be independently developed, and unmanned aerial vehicle cleaning equipment will also be invested in the future. The base also plans to support wind power and electrochemical energy storage, achieving complementary peak shaving of various new energy sources and accumulating measured data for the domestic new energy industry.Editor/Gao Xue