Concentrated solar power: Resources and labour

Steel, glass, salt, land and surprising amounts of water

What this tab covers The natural resources (land, water, materials, fuel or feedstock) and the labour needed to capture this energy, per unit, with the reason each is needed.

CSP needs strong direct sunlight, about 2 hectares per MW, large amounts of steel, glass, concrete and nitrate salt, and, unless dry-cooled, as much water per MWh as a coal plant. It employs more people per MW than PV.

Natural resources

Resource	How much	Why it is needed
Land and direct sunlight	About 2 ha per MW for troughs, towers and Fresnel, 1-1.5 ha for dishes; best sites (over 2,800 kWh/m2 a year of direct sunlight) yield 100-130 GWh per km2 a year¹	Only direct-beam light can be focused, and mirrors are spaced to avoid shading.
Water	Wet-cooled troughs median 906 gallons per MWh (3.4 m3, calculated), towers 786; dry-cooled 26-78; coal about 687⁵¹	The steam cycle must reject heat. Dry cooling uses about 10% of the water but costs about 10% more and loses about 7% of output.
Steel	About 340 t per MW net for a 110 MW tower with 17.5 hours of storage, about 100 t without storage (calculated)¹⁰	Heliostat frames, tower, tanks, pipework and receiver tubes.
Concrete	About 1,100 m3 per MW for the same tower plant (calculated)¹⁰	Foundations for thousands of heliostats, the tower, tanks and buildings.
Glass	About 100 t of coated mirror glass per MW (calculated)¹⁰	Silvered glass mirrors reflect sunlight onto the receiver.
Nitrate salt	About 56,000 t for the same plant (about 510 t per MW, calculated)¹⁰	Sodium and potassium nitrate stays liquid at receiver temperatures (up to about 565 C), storing heat cheaply for many hours.

Labour

Phase	How much	Skills	Why it is needed
All phases	About 8-10 jobs per MW; 126,000 CSP jobs worldwide in 2024, 107,000 in China¹¹¹	Mechanical, civil and electrical engineers, welders, plant operators	Each plant is a bespoke thermal power station with many moving mirrors.
Construction	About 500 workers for a 50 MW plant¹	Civil works, steel erection, mirror assembly, pipework	Thousands of mirrors and kilometres of pipe are assembled and aligned on site.
Operation and maintenance	About 30-40 staff for a 50 MW plant¹	Operators, maintenance technicians, mirror-cleaning crews	Turbine and salt systems need constant supervision; mirrors need cleaning.
Decommissioning	No figure; Ivanpah's planned 2026 closure will be one of the first large retirements⁴	Demolition and recycling of steel, glass and salt	Few commercial plants have been retired.

Sources

Concentrating Solar Power: Technology Brief E10 IRENA and IEA-ETSAP, 2013
Renewables 2025 Global Status Report: Concentrating solar thermal power REN21, 2025
Operational water consumption and withdrawal factors for electricity generating technologies: a review of existing literature (Macknick et al., Environmental Research Letters 7, 045802), Tables 1 and 2 IOP Publishing (copy hosted by OpenEI), 2012
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Plant in Tower Configuration with and without Thermal Energy Storage (Gasa et al., Sustainability 13(7), 3672), Tables 1 and 2 MDPI, 2021
Renewable Energy and Jobs: Annual Review 2025 (Table 1) IRENA and ILO, 2026