A nighttime-operating solar power plant

On April 30, a significant achievement took place at the highest concentrated solar power (CSP) tower project in the world the Tushuo 100 MW CSP plant located in Amdo County, Tibet. All 15,927 heliostats made by Dongfang Boiler have now been successfully delivered. This project is a vital energy initiative for the Tibet Autonomous Region and it's the first tower-type CSP plant in the area. Set in the Tanggula Mountains at over 4,650 meters high, the plant utilizes advanced tower CSP technology and comes with an 8-hour molten salt thermal energy storage system. The heliostat field has a total reflective area of more than 800,000 square meters. I'm curious about how these solar plants can work at night, and AI gave me a rundown of how it functions: "1. The System Operation (Technical Process) Heat Collection (During the Day): Thousands of computer-controlled mirrors (heliostats) capture sunlight and focus it onto a central receiver at the top of a tower. Liquid salt is pumped through this receiver, where it gets heated to very high temperatures typically between 290 and 565 degrees Celsius. 2. Energy Storage: The heated salt flows into a large, well-insulated 'hot' storage tank. The tank's walls prevent heat loss to a minimum (less than 1% of the thermal energy per day). This salt can stay liquid and hot for many hours, even days. 3. Power Generation (Day and Night): When the electrical grid needs power (like after sunset or during peak evening times), the hot salt is sent from the storage tank into a steam generator. Here, it transfers its heat to water.

It could also be preheated using the heat from the miners! i would love to look at this setup.

I haven't heard of this solution before. The efficiency of heated salt is described as being half that of solar panels due to optical and thermal losses, plus the thermodynamic losses of the turbine, but it's an autonomous power plant without batteries. And what happens on days when there's little sun?

This actually nothing new and in fact a huge facility in the US is shutting down 2/3rds of its capacity. https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/once-an-engineering-marvel-two-thirds-of-this-concentrated-solar-power-plant-will-shut-down-after-a-california-utility-pulled-two-of-its-ppas/  And https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/10/06/why-californias-closed-2-billion-solar-plant-is-not-a-signal-of-industry-failure/ Then there is the issue of them frying birds... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/brightsource-solar-plant-sets-birds-on-fire-as-they-fly-overhead-1.2739512

Lot of land for the mirror plant 1800 hectares. Maybe 2.5x1800= 4500 acres. Ai says 2000 400watt solar panels on an acre.  Or 800,000 watts an acre 3,600,000,000 watts on 1800 acres Factor of 5 is 18,000,000,000 watts a day if using solar pa That is 18,000,000 kwatts a day That is 18,000 mega watts a day At 40 bucks a megawatt 720,000 usd in power a day. If solar panels. Not mirrors. This build shuting down is 392 x 24 about 9600 megawatts. Maybe  392 x 5 or 2000 megawatts To build 2000x1800= 3.6 million 400 watts panels would be under 1 billion . So same land and 50% cheaper to switch to 400 watt panel build. Panels have issues. But they would produce 720,000x365=  260 million a year worth of 4 cent power. Yearly. And at 6 cents 390 million which with no incentives pays off a 1 billion dollar  build in 3 to 4 years. Of course  tariffs may have made the new panel build cost 1.2 billion

Something rarely seen is the combination of PV and thermal storage. Just as with the mirror setup simply divert part of the power generated during the day to heating the salt. Gives 24x7 power without frying birds.