Author: Wang Zhifeng (September 30, 2025)
The moonlight flows like cooled molten salt, streaming from Shanxi across the Mediterranean's folds, dyeing the night a deep blue. Wind blows from Catalonia's cape, carrying the coolness of salt and citrus, stirring the faces of sixteen CSP professionals: clear gray eyes behind German lenses, Chinese black hair with subtle curls, Australian surfer's short stubble. They sit around a long table on the coast, one end facing Barcelona's sacred temple, the other stretching across the ocean to Casablanca, arranging beer bottles, wine bottles, and cola bottles in a circle. The golden bottles resemble unlit concentrators, or liquid sun smuggled to Earth ahead of schedule. Waves advance and retreat, counting their heartbeats with a gentle rhythm containing the ocean's mighty power.
They come from different latitudes and longitudes, yet share the same language of light. As the Chinese "molten salt heat storage" leaves the lips, German "Salzschmelze" follows, Spanish "sales fundidas" slides past like a guitar glissando, English "molten salt" brings surfing's wake—four pronunciations collide in the moonlight, reflected by the sea into silver-white formulas. Beer foam rises like miniature heliostat arrays; a strong man flicks it gently, making the foam spin to mimic the mirror field's sun-tracking dance. The German lenses say that Fresnel-arranged heliostats have errors less than 0.1 degrees, equivalent to aiming at a coin in Munich from Berlin; the Chinese black hair laughs that Qinghai Delingha's mirror field can store sunlight until midnight, like locking the moon in a salt jar; the Chinese woman Dr. Chen in Spain adds that Andalusia's tower plant uses olive oil for heat transfer, allowing the sun's flavor to be fried into chips; the Australian surfer Professor Saw shakes his black hair, saying South Australia's concentration folds light directly into molten salt, like folding ocean waves into a pocket. Talking excitedly, they describe 1GW as a blanket that can be rolled up and packed into a suitcase, taken back to hometown rooftops, deserts, isolated islands, even tents.
As the moonlight lowers, brown, yellow, and black hair intertwines on the sand like three fiber optic cables, connecting their pupils into a WiFi network. The German lenses pull out a laser pointer from his backpack; a green beam flashes across, illuminating a beer bottle, immediately revealing tiny spectral lines like a dismantled rainbow. The Chinese black hair takes the pointer and writes a line of Python in the wet sand: while sun: charge future. The Chinese woman in Spain gently changes the equals sign to a heart shape with her sandal. The Australian surfer points the green light toward the sea, and distant phosphorescence appears, as if their code has been compiled by the ocean, secretly running to drive solar concentration power generation. A Malaysian engineer inverts an empty bottle, pressing the mouth into the sand to create a miniature heat absorption tower; the others simultaneously raise their bottles, pouring the remaining wine into the tower top. The golden liquid flows down the walls like molten salt being ignited, emitting a soft amber glow. In that moment, the world shrinks into a photon, passing through beer foam, through gaps between five languages, through tangled yellow and black hair, refracting in their young pupils into the same signal—light enough to float, yet sufficient to illuminate the next unnamed city.
The tide sounds fade, and the crab-shell blue crescent moon in the east also drifts away. They walk side by side into the seawater, letting waves burst into silent fireworks at their ankles. The German lenses say the next gathering will be at the equator, folding sunlight into twenty-four hours of dawn; the Chinese black hair adds that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's light is already prepared, awaiting mirror push; the Chinese woman in Spain laughs that she'll bring flamenco rhythms, letting heliostats tap dance; the Australian surfer plants his skateboard in the sand, saying he'll record the sound of waves into heat storage, giving electricity tides too. Black and yellow hair turn back simultaneously, taking one last look at the absorption tower made of beer bottles—as the moonlight withdraws, the bottle walls still glow, like a morning star pre-deposited. They wave, pressing their laughter into the waves, letting the Mediterranean save a backup for them. The world is vast, light is long, and in this moment, they have welded their shadows into the same fiber optic cable, quietly pre-charging for the dawn that has not yet risen.