> The plans for the world’s largest floating solar power plant illustrate how quickly the floating solar field can grow. The project is aimed at expanding an existing 145-megawatt (AC) floating solar array at the Cirata hydropower reservoir in West Java, Indonesia, to reach a total of up to 500 megawatts.
> The existing array went online and was proclaimed successful just last month. Evidently Masdar and the state-owned Indonesian utility PLN (Nusantara Power) already liked what they saw, because they used the occasion of COP 28 to announce the new expansion on December 3.
I may be out of the loop but this is my first time hearing about this type of solution and it's genius! As someone else mentioned, some reservoirs already use shade balls because they reduce evaporation so we are already familiar with shading our reservoirs and generating power from that shade seems like a win-win!
They are related in that it is combining solar power + water storage.
I believe the canal structure is elevated. Which might be initially more expensive for the scaffolding, but it strikes me as fewer long term complications vs direct water contact. Fewer worries about algae growth on the panels, shorts developing at the connection points, etc.
Being on the water also helps keep the solar panels in their optimal operating temperature, which can make them significantly more efficient at generating electricity
This is a great combination of these two technologies. Reservoirs really benefit from being shaded, to reduce the amount of evaporation you get out of them.
You can also let the dam fill up more when the sun is shining and use more of that power later.
I dont think it's quite appreciated enough how well hydropower - including existing hydropower installations and new ones like snowy 2's 350 GWh battery - helps offset the variability of solar and wind.
Not everything has to be offset with a lithium ion battery pack or an overpriced nuclear power station.
I would think there is some possibility for wind to be combined with hydroelectric too; Both the drainage of cold water from the basin and the rapid cooling on the spillway should create air currents.
In principle, sure. Lake Mead is in a warm enough location that it never freezes over (which could pose some difficulty for other lake-floated solar) and the intense heat and low humidity mean that quelling evaporation could be very beneficial.
In practice, the area of Lake Mead is about 250 square miles = ~160k acres * (~200 kW/acre) = ~30 GW of potential peak generating capacity. This means that a solar farm covering Lake Mead would immediately become the largest power plant in the world at peak output, surpassing the Three Gorges Dam (hydro) by almost 50%. It would be more than a quarter of all solar capacity existing in the United States as of 2022. So the overall electricity sector may not be ready for such an undertaking.
Partial cover is more feasible at this point, eventually extending to the entire lake, hopefully.
correct. It's generally not feasible to shade such a large area over water.
But evaporation does take its toll on reservoir water.
There was a proposal not long ago to shade the canal carrying water from Northern California to Southern California. Reducing evaporation was one of the touted benefits[1].
A study by the University of California, Merced gives a boost to the idea, estimating that 63 billion gallons of
water could be saved by covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels that could also generate 13
gigawatts of power.
The estimate given when they were added in 2015 – in the middle of a record drought – was that they would prevent the loss of 300 million gallons of water each year.
in the USA (South, I presume, since lakes freeze in the north) - big lakes are used for recreational boating big time. dudes just floating out there in speedboats, drinking bud light and waterskiing. said dudes probably would NIMBY the hell out of something like this, which would involve "no wake" signs, unsightliness, etc. etc.
Could be great for drinking-water reservoirs though.
if freezing and big waves/storms wasn't a problem, the Great Lakes obv. but with so much flat underused land in the west, putting these in water might not make so much sense. unless there are economies of being able to produce them completely in a factory with a dock and then float them into place. but unpredictable, violent storms seem like a huge asterisk.
Let's be real here, it's probably not "the dudes" who like to fish who will fight this. They will be co-opted by rich waterfront homeowners, who don't want their view "ruined". For a real world example, see how fisherman and environmentalists have been used as pawns by the rich to fight offshore wind off Nantucket.
NIMBYism isn't exactly a hard desire to understand. Do you really want some random person messing with your several-hundred-thousand-dollar investment because it'll probably be good for you in some intangible way at some point in the future?
If you refuse to accept the argument that people should have a say in how their life is changed, can you at least explain why this is a bad thing that doesn't require the context of the ultra-wealthy?
It really depends what the impact actually is. If it's only affecting the view or the recreational value, then sorry, some demands and expectations simply don't scale. And that is also valid for small property owners - there are too many cases of zoning laws that prevent cities from increasing urban density to combat high property prices.
In cases where the reservoir was financed by selling pretty properties at the shore, then the whole thing is a non-starter anyways since the former would make it very easy to just sue the utility company should they touch the lake.
Yes, I should be very clear that I don't want to protect large property owners with thousands of lots trying to protect their investments. That's a point where it's just the business's skill that's in question.
However, most people will only ever buy one house. Or at the very least, they'll only ever own one house at a time (small legal overlaps not withstanding). It's a completely different story. That's all I'm saying.
And I understand from personal experience* that those people don't want a train line, a garbage dumpster, or a facility with toxic fallout being put next to them. But I also think that overly sweeping restrictions can block initiatives with small downsides but overall positive impact on society like building solar panels or wind turbines.
*: the place where I grew up now has a factory next to it. It's unsightly, though it could have been much much worse, and sometimes noisy, but at least my parents at least can now also enjoy remote heating at ok-ish conditions. And it's nothing compared to the major pre-existing road immediately next to their house.
Rich or not, placing your personal interests above the community to the detriment of the community is obviously harmful. In my area specifically it applies to affordable housing. Property owners have turned a blind eye to rising home costs (more equity yay!), enacted policies to prevent higher density affordable housing (among other things) and are now shocked there's no workforce and an aging population.
But hey, whatever saves you another few hundred bucks on your tax bill right?
This is a fine debate to have. Giving someone crap because they're on the other side of this argument (not the strawman of "saving a few hundred bucks on your tax bill", but the more generic idea overall) is what I take issue with. People have different priorities, and "harmful to the community" is a pretty nebulous idea at best.
This is a great point. Many of those reservoirs included recreation benefits in the accounting that led to them being funded in the first place, so it may not be trivial to impinge on them.
>in the west, putting these in water might not make so much sense.
OTOH, evaporation is also a big problem there (roughly a couple million acre-feet/year in the Colorado drainage, from memory) so mitigating that would be beneficial.
Unsure, as each local community is different, but the NREL produced a study in 2018 that roughly 10% of the US' annual electrical production could be satisfied with similar installs. All politics are local as the saying goes. It has been quite challenging interacting with local stakeholders on the topic when they believe outright falsehoods (solar cannot be recycled today, it reduces their property values, etc), which is where state laws preempting local planning come into play for renewable development (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York as of this comment). I have literally provided evidence (a packet I have created to educate on these topics with robust citations) to these people politely in person who then downgrade to, "I don't care, I don't like it." (not everyone, but more common than you would hope for) I am advocating in other states for similar legislation that overrides local planning to continue down this path. Works better in certain states than others, obviously.
> A 2018 study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that installing floating solar installations on the more than 24,000 human-made reservoirs in the U.S. could produce around 10 percent of the nation’s annual electricity production.
More reading:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04735 ("Floating Photovoltaic Systems: Assessing the Technical Potential of Photovoltaic Systems on Man-Made Water Bodies in the Continental United States")
Many large areas of water freeze at winter. But maybe the solar panels could be used to give out heat so that they don't freeze. Some loss of power in the winter then but so it is anyway.
You don’t need hearing to avoid freezing. You can just pump bubbles around the solar panels to prevent ice from forming. That’s what marinas do if they don’t take the boats out in winter
I always have loved this idea, but people were trying this in the “cleantech boom” (~2008-10) and all failed. Why didn’t it work back then and what’s different today?
Solar has become so cheap that the bottleneck is the interconnection queue - utilites are overwhelmed by the amount of modelling that they have to do to ensure the stability and capacity of the grid with the addition of more renewables. (There are a number of ways that they make this harder for themselves. These processes are very much not built for intermittency.)
Hydropower plants are already permitted and connected generators. They are allowed to produce energy for sale onto the grid. From the utility's perspective, adding solar to a hydropower plant is the same as if there was a year with extra rainfall - the maximum (and reserve) power limits will still be adhered to, but more total energy will come from that single source.
(Note that solar on the ground right next to the hydropower plant would have the same benefits without the additional costs of floating, but often hydropower plants are built in geographies that are more challenging for ground-mounted solar - they're either extremely hilly or built out.)
Wikipedia lists early deployments and the ramp up of production seems to mirror other solar uptake suggesting the early ones proved the concept enough to get the next generation built.
Solar power and batteries are significantly cheaper now compared to then because of a boom in Chinese PV manufacturing, and thanks to Joe Biden are facing stiff competition from American PV and battery manufacturing in addition to subsidies. for American deployment.
This particular deployment in Indonesia is a knock-on side effect of how cheap it's getting for everyone!
But back then PV cost the same for everyone: fixed terrestrial, tracker, floating, etc. This is true today: in both cases everybody is buying the same panels.
The argument for floating is and was: available, generally unshadowed land, already flat, with power connection often already there, and lower deployment.
So what’s different now? I’d love for this to succeed.
PV now costs less for everyone. That can and seems to make the difference in whether industrial scale deployment is cheap enough for commercial entities to invest.
Or maybe this was just a novel although simple idea: Use the pool at powerplants to put the cells there. Maybe powerplants didn't think of it because they were opposed to solar ideologically.
PV costs were same for all but may have been higher than alternative energy sources and that shift has been occurring more recently.
I’d also guess that shear will to think outside the box has increased. We’ve seen some things the last 15 years when it comes to the actual effects of climate change. The 15 years prior to that the climate change story could still be denied (by some) and I’d argue that now we’ve all seen and felt it and it’s pretty undeniable (without some bias).
Yes - why are some many strangely dissatisfied with the obvious way to deploy panels - it's just too simple? Panels are cheap, steel frames are cheap and there's plenty of cheap land available. And such a set-up is very cheap and easy to install and maintain.
Why the need to add complexity? Putting panels onto domestic rooftops, trying to construct roadways with panels, floating panels on bodies of water, adding tracking mechanics, adding active cooling systems, etc. - all increase installation and maintenance costs and decrease reliability and simplicity. I just don't see what the problems are that these efforts are trying to solve.
Some people go bonkers about the prospect of agricultural land being used for anything other than the more photogenic kinds of farming.
Some of these people are farmers who object to having to pay market rates to buy or lease land, and should be told precisely where to get off. But farmers are a politically protected species.
All other applications of solar have standard engineering practice to deal with the extreme conditions of their installation environments. See for example this top hit from a web search about solar and hail:
I suspect you're underestimating the cost and complexity of such an operation.
Artificial islands exists, but need constant upkeep (adding more material as it's eroded/reclaimed by the sea). Those don't float, they're anchored to the sea bed. Things that do float need even more upkeep, because a larger part of their surface area comes in contact with saltwater, which is very good at ruining everything it touches. Ship maintenance is expensive. Floating city maintenance would be staggeringly expensive. I can imagine it being nearly as complex as building a city on the moon.
My city has an area of town that's got a bunch of semi-permanent floating houses attached to three or four boardwalks. Essentially house boats but far more house than boat. They are a good tourist attraction and cute cozy houses but from what I understand they cost a small fortune in upkeep and insurance compared to a regular house.
Seriously, though, a lot of big cities are or were ports, have centres near the coast, and are constrained from growing further inland by geological features or transport time. Extending those cities out to sea, by reclamation or on floats, is at least superficially appealing.
Reclamation is a non-starter if sea-level rise is the concern. Basically we're talking about making boat cities. To me this seems nuts since there's nothing stable about it. The largest passenger boats we have today are cruise liners, and they have relatively brief lifespans, very expensive upkeep, and suffer catastrophes on a regular basis. Thinking that the future for human development is living on boats seems desperate.
reclamation is very different than floats. I'm not sure what you mean by superficially appealing, or probably more critically, to whom you think it appealing.
Most people with any familiarity with engineering or marine environments would find the concept of floating cities as a terribly impractical idea, at first look, do the cost and complexity. It would make far more sense to build a city in a desert and build a megaproject to bring it water from the ocean.
I would agree floating cities has some sci-fi fantasy appeal. cool setting for a book or cartoon, where one could ignore the real implications. Not unlike space stations or moon bases in that respect.
The Netherlands does not have that many houseboats. Amsterdam is famous for them sure, but the city is not handing out any more permits and afaik has no plans to.
Reclamation could be interesting in a limited number of circumstances but realistically we would be better served by improving transit inland. Even in Europe, there is a ton of room for improvement to connect rural areas to cities which would alleviate much of the burden that people feel to live closer to work and commerce.
It's like that old joke about the two happiest days in a boat-owner's life: When they first buy the boat, and when they finally sell it.
An exaggeration, but the point is that floating-stuff has a whole bunch of maintenance headaches and extra-expenses which most people don't anticipate, and I imagine the problem will be _even worse_ when it comes to floating city houses/blocks.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/masdar-and-pln-adva...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirata_Dam
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319212438/http://www.ieahyd...
> The existing array went online and was proclaimed successful just last month. Evidently Masdar and the state-owned Indonesian utility PLN (Nusantara Power) already liked what they saw, because they used the occasion of COP 28 to announce the new expansion on December 3.