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Excerpt from news.google.com
An incredible sight has overtaken a field near Guazhou County in China’s Gansu Province: almost 30,000 moving mirrors pointed at two huge central towers. This is China’s new dual-tower solar thermal plant, Interesting Engineering reports.
Solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity are becoming a familiar sight all over the world. Solar thermal energy is a little different.
Instead of using solar panels, this new plant uses its thousands of mirrors — each reflecting up to 94% of the light that hits them — to focus a huge amount of sunlight onto the relatively small area of the towers, Interesting Engineering explains. That produces an incredible amount of heat — so much that similar solar-gathering methods can be used for smelting.
Like coal-fired and nuclear power plants, the solar thermal power plant uses the heat to turn water into steam. The rising steam then turns turbines, which generate electricity.