A solar power plant that generates electricity away from the sun

Located deep in the Nevada desert in the United States, the solar power plant is equipped with more than 10,000 mirrors
.
Each mirror, the size of a billboard next to the highway, is neatly arranged, with a huge 195-meter-high molten salt tower
in the center.
It looks a lot like a communication site
with deep-space aliens.
The solar power plant, built and operated by SolarReserve, will power
75,000 homes.

What sets the plant apart is its ability to generate electricity on cloudy days and at night, a major advance in renewable energy technology and the first of its kind in the world to have such technology at
utility-scale.
Most solar power plants use photovoltaic power generation technology to capture solar energy through solar panels, convert it directly into electricity, and feed it into the grid for immediate use by users
.
Once there is a cloudy day, the energy storage efficiency of such power stations is greatly reduced, and if there is no electricity demand on a sunny day, the stored power is wasted
.

Crescent Dunes is a concentrated photovoltaic power plant that uses tens of thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight into a central molten salt tower
.
In the tower, the pooled sunlight heats 270,000 kilograms of liquid salt above 566 degrees Celsius
.
Salt retains high levels of heat, which to some extent plays the role of
thermal batteries.
When there is a demand for electricity, utility workers use the heat stored in molten salt to drive conventional steam turbines
.
The entire process is zero-carbon
.
The mirror arrangement area is 2.
7 km in diameter, while the total area of all mirrors is 1.
2 million square meters
.