#floatovoltaics

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

Many countries bet on solar panels when engaging in the switch to cleaner energy. But the technology requires much larger areas than conventional fossil fuel plants to generate the same amount of electricity. An emerging solution to save space is to float the panels on bodies of water: floatovoltaics. Scientists believe this new approach could help solar energy to scale globally and fight climate change, but its environmental impacts are largely unexplored.

The world’s first commercial floatovoltaic system was installed on an irrigation pond at a California winery in 2008. Since then, bigger plants with a capacity of hundreds of megawatts have been built on lakes and hydropower reservoirs in China, and more are planned in Southeast Asia and Brazil.

“Floatovoltaics are one of the fastest-growing power generation technologies today and a promising low-carbon energy source,” said aquatic ecosystem ecologist Rafael Almeida, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Almeida explained that ideally, floating panels are placed in human-made bodies of water, such as irrigation channels and the reservoirs of hydropower plants, not taking up land that could otherwise be used for nature preserves or food production. Reservoirs at hydropower plants, especially, have the advantage of already having the infrastructure to distribute electricity.

In a recent post on solar power and California’s droughts, we mentioned that most locations considered for “floatovoltaics” are off-limits to the public. In other words, they might float in the holding areas at the Bryte Bend Water Treatment Plant in West Sacramento, but you’d never see them on Folsom Lake. That’s because Sacramento solar panels deployed on Folsom Lake would get in the way of…

Another Location for Solar Panels

Can Solar Panels Float? Photovoltaic panel systems can be in a lot of different places. You see them on home and commercial rooftops, on standalone mounts in fields, as giant farms in prairies and deserts, even on mobile battery banks and flashlights. And when you add the innovative approaches encouraged by developers, you will likely see different solar systems pop up in unexpected locations.…