Who said there is nothing new under the sun?
One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photovoltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.
FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.
The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.
On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.
Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines.
Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.
A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power.
Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast.
The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine.
In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”
A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.
Who said there is nothing new under the sun?
One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photovoltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.
FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.
The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.
On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.
Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines.
Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.
A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power.
Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast.
The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine.
In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”
A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.
Source: Voice of America