The photo is sourced from Deme Group
Externally the platform will resemble a semi-submersible drilling rig used in offshore exploration: the deck with solar panels mounted on it are sustained by four supports, to which pontoons filled with water will be attached from below. After the platform is taken out to sea, the pontoons will be anchored to the seabed, while the deck will remain above the water at a several metre height, which will minimise the risk of wave impacts on the solar panels. So, the design will repeat the float remaining buoyant when immersed in liquids.
The innovation will expand the scope of floating solar panels to install, which mainly lakes and hydropower plants (HPPs) have been used so far. For example, in 2022, NTPC (India) installed a 100 MW solar power plant (SPP) spreading over 243 acres on the surface of the reservoir located in the city of Ramagundam, the state of Telangana, the south of the country. In its turn, the Portuguese Solaris Float in 2020 commissioned a 50.7 kW prototype of a floating solar power plant on the Oostvoornse Meer lake, the west of the Netherlands. It is a round-shaped plant anchored and cabled to the bottom, and equipped with trackers able to change the tilt angle and the azimuth of the solar panels, depending on the time of day.
The project is also able to facilitate the achievement of the cost recovery for floating solar power plants, which partly depends on their geographic location. “If a power plant is located somewhere at low latitude, the received radiation level is higher. In such places, floating plants will, let’s say, bring more profit given that we will install them at high latitudes, i.e. the question is precisely where we will install them. The more radiation the panels receive, the faster they will pay off,” Hesan Ziar, Professor at Delft University of Technology, said in his interview with the Global Energy Association.
Solar power plants are the second most common source of renewable energy. If global capacity of the available hydropower plants (HPPs) reached 1,360 GW in 2021, this figure was 825 GW for wind turbines, and 849 GW for solar power plants. Of these, 843 GW come from the land-based and floating solar power plants, and 6 GW- from solar concentrators, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
