When Joe Seaman-Graves, the city planner for the working class town of Cohoes, New York, Googled the term 'floating solar,' he didn't even know it was a thing. What he did know is that his tiny town needed an affordable way to get electricity and had...
Seaman-Graves soon found the reservoir could hold enough solar panels to power all the municipal buildings and streetlights, saving the city more than $500,000 each year. He had stumbled upon a form of clean energy that is steeply ramping up. Floating solar panel systems are beginning to boom in the United States after rapid growth in Asia. They’re attractive not just for their clean power and lack of a land footprint, but because they also conserve water by preventing evaporation.
The concept of floating solar is simple: attach panels onto rafts so they float on water instead of blocking off land that could be used for agriculture or buildings. The panels are sealed and act as a lid that brings evaporation down to nearly zero, benefiting regions like California that repeatedly experience periods of drought. The water also keeps the panels cool, allowing them to generate more electricity than their land-mounted counterparts, which lose efficiency when they get too hot.
One of the biggest floating solar farms in the U.S. is the 4.8 MW project in Healdsburg, California, built by Ciel & Terre. “We’re excited to see it start gaining traction in the US,” said Robert Pohlman, vice president of NJRCEV. Duke Energy, the large U.S. utility that owns some 50,000 MW of energy capacity, is aiming to achieve net zero carbon emissions from electricity production by 2050. It just launched a small floating solar pilot, just shy of 1 MW in Bartow, Florida.
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