China’s Newest Power Plant Swaps Steam for Supercritical CO2

China just broke ground on a revolutionary new hybridized energy production and storage facility. The power plant will store excess energy in the form of molten salt, and then produce electricity during peak demand times through a supercritical carbon dioxide system. The goal of the project is to limit energy waste while also stabilizing the local power grid. The project could also inform future next-gen energy and energy storage systems, including for application in the nuclear power sector and even on the moon. 

Construction of the Ruitan demonstration project began last week in Shandong province in eastern China. The facility is expected to be up and running by next year, at which point it will be the first of its kind to operate on the planet. The first phase of the project will involve a supercritical unit with a capacity of 50 megawatts, and a molten salt energy storage system with a 100 megawatt capacity.

The facility is being built on the site of an existing coal-fired plant, the Bajiao power station in Yantai. The new system will capture surplus energy from the coal plant when demand is low and store it in the form of thermal energy within a molten salt reactor. Then, at peak demand hours, that thermal energy will be used to power a supercritical unit that uses carbon dioxide to spin a turbine to create electricity, instead of using steam like a traditional power plant. The carbon dioxide is held under very specific temperature and pressure ranges, at which point the molecules behave like both a liquid and a gas and can power a closed-loop system.

Supercritical carbon dioxide units offer several critical advantages. “These plants are smaller than traditional units, do not require water, have higher power generation efficiency and produce fewer carbon emissions,” reports the South China Morning Post. Moreover, they are highly adjustable and more agile than traditional power plants. 

The experimental site is just one of a huge number of cutting edge and next-gen clean energy technologies being developed and deployed across China. The country is currently home to the biggest and fastest-growing clean energy tech sector on the planet, with research and development of new methods on the rise at an astonishing pace. In 2000, Chinese companies filed approximately 5 percent of the world’s clean energy patent applications. By 2022, that figure was 75 percent. 

“Accused for years of copying the technologies of other countries, China now dominates the renewable energy landscape not just in terms of patent filings and research papers, but in what analysts say are major contributions that will help to move the world away from fossil fuels,” the New York Times wrote in an August 2025 report.

This assertive approach has helped China to rapidly establish itself as the world’s first electrostate. Between the years 2019 and 2025, China outspent the rest of the world combined on energy energy investing, contributing more than half of the $1.1 trillion invested globally. By comparison, the United States, the world’s largest economy, saw a relatively paltry $236 billion in clean energy investing. This has given China unprecedented reach and leverage in global clean energy markets. Thanks to the extreme concentration of clean energy manufacturing and development in China, the rest of the world is reliant on Chinese technologies to enable their own clean energy buildout. 

And when it comes to energy storage, the United States is moving backward. In an attempt to wean U.S. markets off of Chinese clean energy supply chains, the Trump administration recently ordered a ban on using Chinese-made batteries in utility-scale energy storage systems. However, the vague wording of the executive order has left developers in limbo, while barring U.S. companies from buying affordable Chinese-made batteries may kneecap capacity additions in the short term. 

While the technology being developed at Ruitan cannot directly compete with battery storage and will likely never make up a huge segment of the energy storage system, it is one piece of an all-of-the-above approach to energy tech that has allowed Beijing to establish what will likely be lasting energy dominance on a global scale.

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