Power Construction Corporation of China (PowerChina) said on 1 October that it had connected to the grid, in Gonghe county, Qinghai province, a one-gigawatt solar complex: 900 MW of photovoltaics and 100 MW of tower CSP with molten salt. SVT reported on Monday, 19 October, that the plant was being tied into the power system and that, according to the state-owned company, it could cut emissions by about two million tonnes of CO₂ a year once in full operation. Those figures are the operator’s estimates, not a full year of measured savings.

PV Magazine, using the same PowerChina data, writes that full-capacity grid connection took place on 1 October. The thermal field has 10,310 pentagonal heliostats, about 500,000 m² of reflective area and a 219-metre receiver tower. Molten salt stores the heat; the store is sized for eight hours, on the 100 MW side only, not on the whole gigawatt. A 20 MW electric heater can turn surplus output from the PV plant into stored heat.

SVT cites estimated output of 2.2 TWh a year — the Swedish desk’s comparison is the annual use of about 110,000 electrically heated Swedish homes. The thermal-project head, Song Qipeng, says the plant would save 690,000 tonnes of standard coal and 2.07 million tonnes of CO₂ a year. The same order of magnitude appears in PowerChina’s figures, as carried by the China Solar Thermal Alliance.

Qinghai is in north-western China, on the plateau, not in the north-east, as one SVT sentence put it. Gonghe county is in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. This is not the same project as the park of hundreds of thousands of mirrors in Hami, Xinjiang.

SVT sets the estimated millions of tonnes against China’s total greenhouse-gas emissions in 2023, 13.9 billion tonnes. Even if PowerChina’s estimate held up after a year of operation, the share would remain small against the national total.

The Swedish desk notes, citing Carbon Brief, that China’s fossil-free energy industry is growing faster than the rest of the economy and that half of “green” investment goes to solar. At the same time China remains heavily dependent on coal: SVT picks up Financial Times reporting that more than 80 coal-fired units are due to open in 2026, with several hundred further projects planned in the years ahead. Gonghe’s grid connection does not close those sites.

The technology is tower concentrated solar power: the mirrors track the sun, heat the salt, and steam turns a turbine. It is not a mirror park that, on its own, cuts China’s emissions. It is a hybrid plant now on the grid, with savings figures announced by the builder for when it runs at capacity.

Image: Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, California, 28 October 2014, Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The same type of tower-and-mirror plant, not the Gonghe complex in Qinghai.

Sources consulted: Jättesolkraftverk kan minska Kinas klimatutsläpp – med hjälp av speglar — SVT Nyheter; PowerChina switches on 1 GW PV-CSP hybrid plant in northwestern China — PV Magazine.