Floating solar array powering recreational park in Vietnam

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow has completed construction on a 600 kW floating PV array in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The solar plant is powering the Vinhomes Ocean Park, a complex comprising a residential area and park that was built recently in the city's outskirts.

“The solar panels were installed with a tilt angle of five degrees and the anchoring was made with deadweight block anchor[s],” a company spokesperson told pv magazine. “This solution was friendly to the water body and lake bed, which has a depth of five meters, and maintained the original landscape.”

The array was built with a floating structure provided by Sungrow itself and mainstream, 182mm solar panels with a power output of 540 W each. According to the manufacturer, the project will not only power the park and local community but also offer an “attractive landscape.”

The new floating array is not the first project of this kind built in Vietnam and Sungrow said it has deployed around 125 MW of floating PV capacity in the country.

At the end of 2020, two large scale floating PV power plants, totaling 70 MW, were grid connected in the country. The two facilities, each of which have a capacity of 35 MW, were deployed on the Gia Hoet 1 and Tam Bo irrigation lakes, in the commune of Quang Thanh, located in the district of Chau Duc.

Both projects were likely developed under Vietnam's FIT scheme for solar.