floating PV

The Italian market set a record high of 846 GWh of wind energy generation during the first week of November. Meanwhile, European electricity demand decreased over the same period and the MIBEL market registered 19 hours of €0.00/MWh ($0.00/MWh) prices.

The Sri Lankan government’s Ministry of Power and Energy is inviting applicants to submit proposals for the construction of two 100 MW floating solar plants at the hydroelectric Samanalawewa Reservoir. The aim is to complement and “leverage” the country’s third-largest hydroelectric scheme through PV.

The PV industry in Southeast Asia has come a long way since guest author Ragna Schmidt-Haupt, partner at Everoze, reported on solar financing innovation in the region more than a decade ago. In this article, she outlines five factors for success, the newest of which has the potential to become a game changer, and not only in Southeast Asia.

Land is scarce but water is abundant for the Caribbean’s 700 islands. Solar economy professor Christian Breyer tells pv magazine that the region’s archipelagic makeup is not a drawback but a benefit for renewable energy generation, with the ocean potentially serving as the area’s floating solar PV backbone.

An international research team has built a cooling tech consisting of heat absorber pipes that are thermally connected to the PV module, heat releaser pipes that exchange heat with the water body, a series of connecting pipes, and a coolant reservoir. The system claims to create a continuous fluid flow that dissipates heat from the PV cells to the surroundings.

A Chinese-US research group has created an up-to-date spatial datase to identify floating PV systems across the globe. The new tool uses Google Earth images, Sentinel satellite imagery, and multiple spectral indices.

A group of researchers from Belgium performed a complementarity analysis for offshore wind power combined with floating photovoltaics. The team found that complementarity is strong on weekly and monthly timescales, and that it can increase under certain climate change scenarios. Assuming a full permanent transmission loading capability, the researchers calculated that a 3 GW floating solar plant added to the existing wind power in the Belgian North Sea would increase the renewable electricity yield by 47% while occupying only a limited surface area.

Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) is investigating the impact of floating PV systems on oxygen levels and water temperature. The study is focused on determining whether floating PV systems, deployed by Erdgas Südwest in southern Germany, have altered the lake’s thermal stratification and oxygen content.

The Mauritian government’s Central Electricity Board (CEB) is inviting consultancy firms to pitch their bids on conducting a feasibility study into developing a 30 MW floating solar PV farm at Tamarind Falls Reservoir in the archipelago’s southwest.

Abu Dhabi-based Masdar and PLN Nusantara Power, an Indonesian state-owned electricity generator, have agreed to more than triple the size of the Cirata floating PV power plant in West Java so it can generate 500 MW.