Last week, Chinese developers announced they had broken ground on a new concentrated solar plant in the Xizang province of China, formerly known as Tibet. Upon completion, it will be the world’s highest-elevation concentrated solar power (CSP) plant, but in the annals of the energy transition it should perhaps be known for where it wasn’t built rather than where it was.

The Wumatang CSP facility uses curved mirrors to heat oil, which warms molten salt tanks that store energy for up to six hours after dark, effectively acting as a giant thermal battery. Due for completion in 2027, it will generate ~719 million kWh annually, which on balance will replace roughly 217,000 tonnes of coal. The project also adopts a "solar-plus-grazing" model, raising equipment high enough for local livestock to graze underneath, taking feedback from criticisms of previous CSP projects.

While the Wumatang project is far from the biggest energy story in recent weeks, it adds concentrated solar power to the list of once-promising climate technologies that continue to prosper in China years after their purported collapse in the United States and Europe.

For advocates of American clean industry who looked up to see China dominating the clean tech supply chain in 2020, the story of the Wumatang CSP plant will ring familiar. American automakers that once literally laughed off emerging Chinese competitors have watched as China has become the world’s leading producer of automobiles worldwide, above all with electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the nation which saw the invention of solar panels at Bell Labs in 1954 looked elsewhere for seventy years while China has redefined global energy security on the strength of its wind and solar industries.

The story of CSP is another example of a renewable technology for which American climate tech media has read several, sometimes scathing, obituaries after the technology’s repeated failure to generate profit or power, only for the technology to pop up in China several years later.

So, why has China proven capable of resurrecting another climate technology deemed unworkable in the United States and Europe, and what does it mean for the world’s energy transition?

Concentrated solar power is a technology that takes the rudiments of steam power that kicked off the Industrial Revolution and applies them to solar energy.

There are two basic configurations: CSP with towers, and without towers. The CSP that most people know and love (or quite possibly hate) consists of a sprawling array of mirrors (heliostats) that direct sunlight toward a tower containing molten salt. When the molten salt heats up to nearly 600°C, it is pumped back down to a storage tank where it meets a heat exchanger. The resulting heat turns water in an adjacent tank into steam, which drives a turbine to generate electricity.

The other approach is known as a parabolic trough system, in which a series of tubes containing heat-transfer fluid run across the heliostats and into a molten salt tank on the ground, evoking less of a techno-pagan sun ritual than the beaming light of a CSP power tower.

The American CSP boom began in earnest in 2010, when fifteen projects were built across the United States. Over the next decade, CSP contributions to grids across the world would grow fivefold, although that number obscures the fact that construction of new CSP plants had all but ground to a halt by 2015.

Despite its early promise and starring role as a futuristic climate tech, CSP ran into economic challenges almost as soon as it joined the grid.

On the supply side, the economic case for CSP as a power source all but vanished by 2012 with the introduction of cheap Chinese solar panels that outcompeted the solar power offered by unwieldy turbine engines. In 2010, when America’s first CSP projects came online, power from solar panels cost nearly 40 cents per kWh, but fell by nearly 90% over the following decade. CSP electricity fell drastically during that time as well, but even after a 69% decline over the same period, its Levelized Cost of Electricity remained stuck around 12 cents/kWh, nearly three times the cost of PV solar today.

At the same time that foreign competitors were eating CSP’s lunch, federal incentives in the United States were drawing down. The chosen policy tools for supporting CSP in the United were a combination of multi-billion dollar loans and tax credits, rather than feed-in tariffs that have proved more successful in Spain, China and South Africa. Feed-in tariffs are government-issued contracts that establish a set price for electricity over long periods of time, usually 15 to 25 years. That guaranteed price provides confidence for investors who can bank on a buyer and a price even if market conditions change, as they did in the United States with the introduction of Chinese solar panels that cut the price of solar power by an order of magnitude at precisely the time when CSP was supposed to hit the market. This might not have been a problem if the federal investment tax credits had stayed at 30%, which was the rate at the time of America’s CSP boom. But starting in 2015, that tax credit was phased down to 10% during the critical years when CSP technology was maturing.

The final blow to CSP’s economic competitiveness came by way of American profit-margin engineering. Such was the case at Nevada’s Crescent Dunes CSP plant, the first in the United States to be built with thermal energy storage, which was beset with stoppages due to ‘pennywise and pound-foolish’ welding that led to cracks in the molten salt tanks, among other technical setbacks all too common to ‘first of its kind’ projects.

Had CSP managed to prevail from these economic headwinds, it still would have had to contend with backlash from its growing environmental impacts. Before long, it became clear that a beaming tower of 600°C radiance several hundred feet in the air was no friend of the birds. The Ivanpah CSP plant in California reportedly killed birds at a clip of more than 6,000 per year. While this figure is far below the well-documented tyranny of domesticated cats, it cut into the technology’s image as an expensive-but-necessary remedy to the climate crisis.

Another persistent issue for CSP has been its strenuous water demand. In order to operate at maximum efficiency, CSP components have to be cooled with water that leads to a consumption rate comparable to coal-fired thermal generators. That again might not have been a game changer when you consider the water intensity of other economic activities in California, except that CSP works best in desert regions, where water resources are scarce and figure as a political football among local jurisdictions.

CSP’s economic collapse also ran into a particularly unfriendly political atmosphere. By 2015, the public’s awareness of government-funded clean energy projects was focused on the galling failure of Solyndra. The California-based solar company had received more $535 million during the 2009 stimulus package, only to go bankrupt within two years of receiving the loan. Beyond Solyndra’s business failures, it appeared to have used taxpayer money to create a poor man’s Google campus, complete with spa showers and robots that whistled Disney tunes. All told, the American public was primed to see the worst in any clean technology that failed to bring down electricity prices while chewing up taxpayer dollars in the process, and so taxpayer-backed CSP projects were cast as climate-deranged boondoggles by eager detractors.

While CSP’s time may have run out in the United States, it has gotten a longer run in Spain. This is in large part because the Spanish CSP projects were given a second life as energy storage once it was clear that it couldn’t compete with solar and wind.

To date, Spain is the country with the most installed CSP plants at 50, although it will likely be eclipsed by China by 2030. Spanish CSP underwent a similar collapse to that of the American industry, albeit for different reasons. The feed-in tariff scheme for Spanish CSP might have been sustainable had Spain not been hit especially hard by the 2008 crisis, which forced the government to cut funding for its tariffs.

In response, however, Spanish developers have leveraged CSP’s enduring advantage over wind and solar. While CSP is not competitive while the sun is up, it can store solar heat during the day to be deployed as electricity at night, when wind and solar die down. More than 60% of Spain’s 50 CSP plants have been converted to batteries which provide clean power at night to the tune of more than 5GWh per year.

While new CSP installations have stalled across Europe and the United States, Chinese CSP costs have been cut roughly in half between the 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans, making the China the new headquarters of CSP globally.

Rather than building isolated first-of-a-kind projects, Chinese developers are constructing multiple plants simultaneously. Cosin Solar alone had 11 tower plants under construction in 2024. This repetition drives genuine learning-by-doing — automation improvements on the Gonghe project's third solar field cut heliostat installation time by 30% compared to the first field using the same technology.

China has also pursued two deliberate learning pathways. Domestically, Chinese firms have licensed intellectual property and expertise from established players — for example, two of the three Chinese projects commissioned in 2024 used IP from Germany's SBP Sonne for their solar fields. Internationally, Chinese EPC firms like SEPCO III (part of PowerChina) have built experience by delivering projects abroad, including the Redstone plant in South Africa.

With no new projects awarded or breaking ground outside China in 2024, and Chinese firms simultaneously cutting costs, scaling up, and building global delivery capability, the trajectory is clear. Chinese companies are positioned to increasingly dominate the global CSP supply chain — not just as equipment suppliers, but as technology leaders.

Any discussion of climate tech success in China over comparable efforts in the United States (and to a much lesser extent, Europe) summons pre-existing narratives that have been fostered by geopolitics observers in recent years. The most viral among those is the “engineering state vs. the lawyerly society” hypothesis put forward by Dan Wang.

It speaks to a lingering anxiety in the loosely-defined ‘West’ that, beyond ambiguous notions of ceding global hegemony, China can simply build things while the West cannot. The underlying concern is not just that China’s rise means the West’s decline, but they are outcompeting the West at what it understood to be its innate and immutable historical advantage: innovation and progress.

But if China’s ongoing buildout of the CSP proves anything, it is the enduring power of collaboration and iteration. The Wumatang facility’s parabolic trough design will mitigate the threat to birds posed by the Ivanpah tower facility. Meanwhile, Wumatang’s ‘solar-plus-grazing’ configuration will address oft-repeated concerns about land use change related to solar projects that have been weaponized by fossil fuel interests while protecting species on the ground that were displaced by ground clearing for the lower-lying trough designs.

If and when the rest of the world does return to CSP development, it will likely do so on Chinese terms. But with lessons learned from practitioners around the world, the next iteration of this clean technology will hopefully produce results for the whole world when it needs it most.