Floating solar

Hong Kong has limited land, and researchers have checked how much of the city can be powered if most of its water reservoirs were to be fully or partially covered with floating PV systems. At best, full coverage can supply more than 15% of the city’s total demand, and more than 60% of the residential demand.

With a 2 MWp floating solar PV plant and a 3 MWh battery storage system, the Soneva Secret resort project will result in 900,000 to 1,000,000 liters of diesel savings per year, leading to 2,000 plus tons of CO2 emissions reduction.

A University of Exeter team has tested single-axis tracking systems for floating solar across 12 UK sites, finding azimuthal tracking delivers the largest energy gains and lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE).

Scientists have developed a floating PV digital twin system, trained on data from 155 physical experiments, using a two-tier artificial neural network (ANN) with a high-fidelity model and a reduced-order model. Predictive performance reached R2 values of 0.9996 for PV surface temperature and 0.9189 for power output.

Abu Dhabi-based Masdar has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for a 200 MW floating solar project in Malaysia, marking its first project in the country under the fifth large-scale solar program.

Scientists have simulated a solar-powered hydrogen production system comprising 32,050 photovoltaic panels, a pumping system, a seawater reverse-osmosis desalination unit, an electrolyzer, and a hydrogen storage tank. Operation of the system in Oman could potentially yield a levelized cost of electricity of $0.05/kWh and a levelized cost of hydrogen of $9.5/kg.

The new floating PV structure removes traditional maintenance walkways between module rows to enable more solar modules to be installed per hectare. Ciel & Terre has also developed a motorized trolley system capable of rolling over the structure.

An international team of researchers completed a preliminary techno-economic study on the global potential for offshore floating PV (OFPV). The results provide project cost benchmarking, country-specific economic assumptions, and a global assessement of offshore solar’s levelized cost of electricity (LCOE).

Naturgy and BlueNewables are developing a 1 MW floating solar installation off Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with two 500 kW units designed for open-sea operation and scheduled to begin testing in 2026.

A team of researchers in Canada has developed the Jericho Open Resistive Data Logger—an open-access photovoltaic (PV) monitoring platform that integrates data acquisition and processing hardware, a software framework, and a comprehensive sensor array. Designed primarily for agrivoltaic applications, the system has a total estimated cost of around $2,000.