China's 1GW Gobi solar plant skips batteries for molten salt
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- China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) launched commercial trial operation of the 1 GW Hami project in Xinjiang's Gobi Desert on July 1, pairing 900 MW of PV with 100 MW of concentrated solar power (CSP) that uses molten salt heated to 550°C to keep generating up to 8 hours after dark — with no lithium batteries.
- The Hami complex spans 1,817 hectares at the southern foot of the Tianshan mountains and cost CNY 3.53 billion (~$480M); the CSP unit uses 260,000 tracking mirrors across 800,000 square meters of collector surface in a linear Fresnel design that CTG says improves heat-conversion efficiency by up to 10% over conventional Fresnel systems.
- The plant was first connected to the grid on September 18, 2025, and has already supplied 6.54 million kWh to the regional grid; at full capacity CTG projects 2.07 TWh per year — enough for roughly 830,000 households — and about 1.63 million tons of CO₂ avoided annually.
- The Hami project unseated Dubai's 950 MW Noor Energy 1 at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park as the world's largest CSP-PV hybrid.
- CSP thermal storage has historically been more expensive per kWh than PV-plus-battery, and lithium prices keep falling; the article flags cost competitiveness over years of operation — not whether the plant works — as the real test, noting a 100 MW dispatchable block is a demonstration, not a 1 GW overnight plant.
- CTG plans a 3 GW phase 2 expansion at Hami, and China Energy Engineering Corp has already broken ground on a separate nearby 1.5 GW hybrid — 1.3 GW of PV paired with 150 MW of CSP — that would top Hami as soon as it comes online.
- Niu Jianle, CTG's Hami project director, called the grid connection "a landmark leap, bringing the technology out of laboratory research and into large-scale commercial rollout," arguing CSP targets a different job than batteries with its long discharge cycles and zero operational emissions.
Why it matters: The Hami milestone matters because molten-salt CSP has lost the cost race to PV-plus-lithium for a decade, and lithium keeps getting cheaper. CTG has committed roughly $480M and is already moving toward 3 GW at the same site, with a 1.5 GW rival project breaking ground next door — a bet that industrial scale, not battery chemistry, is how to make dispatchable evening solar pencil out in Xinjiang.
