Are Floating Solar Panels the Future of Clean Energy Production?

Floating solar panels have been in the limelight for the past few years, with a recent news analysis from Smithsonian wondering if these will represent a large part of the future renewable energy sector.

What are floating solar panels?

These refer to solar panels that are installed on water bodies – reservoirs, lakes, irrigation canals…

Now, why would someone want to install solar panels on water bodies? Because the area above them is freely available while implementing large scale solar power plants on agricultural land or in cities face significant social and/or economic challenges.

Floating solar panels can also benefit from the extra cooling that they get from the water underneath, as cooling of hot solar panels can maintain the efficiency of the panels which could otherwise reduced by high temperatures.

The world’s largest reservoir (if one considers reservoirs to be artificial lakes) is Ghana’s Lake Volta, having a massive 8500 sq. km of water surface area. If solar panels were installed on this area, it could have a capacity of 850 GW, which is almost the total amount of solar power plants installed globally at the end of 2021! Now for the world’s largest natural lakes – if one leaves out the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest natural lake is Lake Superior (that extends from USA to Canada!) has a total area of about 82000 sq km.

That tells you the potential for floating solar!