Crescent Dunes Sold for $7 Million: What’s Next for America’s Molten-Salt Solar Tower

Crescent Dunes, the Nevada solar tower that cost $975 million to build, has changed hands for $7 million. Sons of Liberty Construction, a Houston-based industrial contractor, took over the plant in July 2026 after buying it out of bankruptcy.

It was the second bankruptcy filing for the plant’s owner, Tonopah Solar Energy, in under six years. Bankers contacted 253 potential buyers, but no one else made a qualifying bid. The plant now operates as Tonopah Energy Center.

Crescent Dunes was built to prove that solar power can keep working after sunset by storing the sun’s heat in molten salt. Since it opened in 2015, it has never produced more than about 40% of its planned annual output.

A Second Bankruptcy and a $7 Million Sale

Tonopah Solar Energy filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware on January 21, 2026, five and a half years after its first filing. According to its first-day court filings, it owed about $173 million to Crescent Dunes Finance, a lender in its own corporate family. It had roughly $598,000 in cash.

The filing was a planned route to a sale, backed by a $10 million bankruptcy loan from the lender to keep the plant running. The owner and the lender both belong to Dragados, part of Spain’s ACS group. At the time, the plant sold power month to month to Switch, a Nevada data center operator. That deal was set to expire on February 21, 2026.

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A formal search for a buyer had been running since May 2025. Of the companies and investors contacted, 13 signed confidentiality agreements, but none made a firm offer before the filing. Sons of Liberty Construction’s $7 million offer became the only bid.

The price covers only a small fraction of that debt. Before closing, the deal also needed approval from the Bureau of Land Management, which leases the land under the plant. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had to sign off as well.

How Crescent Dunes Works

Crescent Dunes turns concentrated sunlight into heat, and the heat into electricity. More than 10,000 sun-tracking mirrors, called heliostats, focus sunlight on a receiver at the top of a 640-foot (195-meter) tower.

Molten salt flows through the receiver and heats from about 550°F to 1,050°F (290°C to 565°C). The hot salt then drains into an insulated tank, where the heat can wait until the grid needs power. The facility holds about 70 million pounds (32,000 tonnes) of salt, which took two months to melt when it was first filled.

To generate electricity, the plant pumps hot salt through heat exchangers that turn water into steam. The steam drives an ordinary turbine, and the cooled salt, still liquid, flows to a second tank to be heated again.

The hot tank holds enough heat to run the 110-megawatt turbine at full power for about 10 hours, or 1.1 gigawatt-hours in total. Under its original contract, the plant ramped up around noon and ran until 10 p.m. or midnight, covering the evening peak in the Las Vegas area. In July 2016, it even ran nonstop for 120 hours as a test.

Four Tank Leaks and a Lost Contract

The hot salt tank leaked four times between 2016 and 2023. Each leak shut the plant down for months, and the March 2019 leak kept it offline for more than two years.

Most hot-tank failures at solar towers start in the tank floor, according to researchers at NREL. Such tanks have mostly been designed under rules written for oil tanks that run below 260°C (500°F). Thin welded floor plates rub against the foundation as the tank heats and cools each day. In NREL’s modeling, such floors can fail in under three years.

A long-time engineer at the site told SolarPACES that the first failure came down to a poorly designed tank floor and the second to poor welding. After the fourth leak in 2023, the operator lowered the hot tank’s temperature to about 850–900°F (455–480°C). That has prevented new leaks, but it cut the plant’s maximum output by about 45%.

Each dip lines up with a tank leak, a shutdown or a missing buyer. Even in its best years, the plant stayed far below its target.

NV Energy was paying around $139 per megawatt-hour under a 25-year contract, but it cancelled the deal in October 2019 after six months without power. By then, large new solar panel farms were selling power for under $30 per megawatt-hour.

In the 2020 bankruptcy, the U.S. Department of Energy, which had guaranteed $737 million in loans, recovered $200 million of the $425 million still owed. A further $100 million, payable only if the plant returned to production and found long-term customers, expired at the end of 2023.

Cobra, the Spanish company that built the facility, took control and restarted it in July 2021. It then ran on a string of short-term contracts and delivered no power at all from January until late May 2025, because it had no buyer.

Who Bought Crescent Dunes?

Sons of Liberty Construction (SOLC) builds, maintains and decommissions industrial facilities, from mines and oil and gas sites to data centers and chemical plants. It was founded by the Rhett brothers. Co-founder Ross Rhett is an Army veteran who worked his way up in the oilfield before starting the company.

The court record describes SOLC as an independent buyer with no stake in the old owner. It first showed interest in November 2025 and visited the site in December. In June 2026, the Bureau of Land Management approved moving the plant’s land rights to Tonopah Energy Center LLC, the SOLC company that now runs it.

The new owner says its goal is to “run the plant well, run it safely” and get the most out of the asset. Its website also promises to publish plant performance figures. U.S. Energy Information Administration data, compiled by GridInfo, show the plant was still generating electricity in July 2026, the month the sale closed.

What the Sale Means for Solar Thermal Power

Most new molten-salt solar plants are now being built in China. The country connected nine new solar thermal plants with 900 MW of capacity in 2025, bringing its total to about 1.7 GW. Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet alone had another 2.6 GW under construction.

Most new Chinese projects pair a 100 MW molten-salt tower with several hundred megawatts of solar panels or wind turbines, according to REN21. The panels and turbines supply cheap power when conditions allow, and the stored heat fills the gaps and helps steady the grid. Crescent Dunes’ previous owners ran the Nevada plant in a similar way, keeping the hot tank full by day and selling mostly at night.

REN21 puts the cost of a recent Chinese 100 MW tower with about 10 hours of storage at roughly $2,200 per kilowatt. That is half the cost of China’s first demonstration plants. Crescent Dunes, completed a decade earlier, cost close to $9,000 per kilowatt.

The world added only 350 MW of solar thermal capacity in 2024, and 250 MW of that was in China. Morocco’s Noor III tower, another molten-salt plant, was offline for most of 2024 because of a tank leak and restarted in early 2025.

In the United States, REN21 found no sign of new projects. In California, regulators rejected a deal in December 2025 that would have let utility PG&E end its contracts with Ivanpah, a solar tower plant without storage. They cited grid reliability and the risk of stranding ratepayer-funded transmission lines.

Battery pack prices for stationary storage fell 45% in 2025, to $70 per kilowatt-hour, according to BloombergNEF. In Morocco, two projects first planned as solar-thermal hybrids were awarded as solar-plus-battery plants in 2024.

What to Watch Next

• Power buyer: The plant’s last known customer, Switch, had only a short-term deal, due to end in February 2026. As of early October 2026, the new owner had not publicly named a long-term buyer.
• Tank temperature: Running the tank at its design temperature again would win back the lost output, but only with a floor that can take the stress. NREL researchers say changing the floor’s thickness and the height of the salt inlet ring could help. It is not known whether the new owner will try such a fix.
• Lease and cleanup costs: The federal land lease runs through 2039 and can be renewed. The previous owner had posted about $13.2 million with the Bureau of Land Management to cover obligations under its land rights, including potential decommissioning.
• Performance data: The new owner has promised to publish performance figures, and monthly federal data will show whether output climbs back toward the original target.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Crescent Dunes still operating?

Yes. Federal data show the plant generating power through July 2026, and the new operator, Tonopah Energy Center, runs it with a team based at the site. To prevent leaks, the previous operator lowered the plant’s operating temperature in 2023, which cut its maximum output.

Who owns Crescent Dunes now?

Texas-based Sons of Liberty Construction owns it through Tonopah Energy Center LLC. The company paid $7 million in a bankruptcy sale that was approved in March 2026 and closed in July.

What went wrong at Crescent Dunes?

Repeated leaks in its hot salt tank caused months-long shutdowns. It also lost its 25-year NV Energy contract in 2019, when its power cost several times more than electricity from new solar panel farms.

How much did U.S. taxpayers lose?

The federal loan guarantee covered $737 million. When the owner went bankrupt in 2020, $425 million was still outstanding, and the Department of Energy got back $200 million of it. Another $100 million depended on the plant’s recovery and expired at the end of 2023.

Is molten-salt solar storage still being built?

Yes, mainly in China, which had about 1.7 GW of solar thermal plants by the end of 2025 and more under construction. Most new Chinese plants are paired with large solar panel and wind farms.

Sources

• Bankrupt Nevada Solar Plant Taps Construction Business for Sale — Bloomberg Law, February 23, 2026
• SSG Advises Tonopah Solar Energy in Sale of Substantially All Assets to Sons of Liberty Construction — ABL Advisor, August 14, 2026
• Crescent Dunes Categorical Exclusion Announcement — Bureau of Land Management, June 12, 2026
• Tonopah Energy Center — operator website

Acknowledgment of AI

Content developed using AI technology, reviewed to ensure clarity, coherence, and accuracy before publication