‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots::New research shows densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa could harvest effectively unlimited energy from solar panels floating on calm tropical seas near the equator.
Of course this assumes those waters stay calm. Given how fast ocean and atmospheric currents are changing that does not seem like a safe assumption. Hurricanes are not likely to move into the region but that’s not the only weather that can wreck big plates of brittle silicon.
*Limitless energy (some limitations apply)
Let’s also consider the corroding effect of these being bathed in salt water 24/7. Will make them very expensive, particularly since you will have to go get on a boat to fix anything.
Yeah, my alma mater has been working on wave energy since I was a student there in the 90s. Dealing with the Ocean’s corrosive environment as well as it flora and fauna is a major challenge. And at least wave power harvesters aren’t hampered by bird poop.
Just… Freaking… Deploy nuclear plants! We have the tech, we know they work, their footprint is small. Why the frack do we feel the need to chase these ridiculous zany ideas that face obvious fundamental engineering flaws, like, oh I don’t know, STORMS and corrosion??? Maintaining these would be a bloody nightmare.
That’s interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a “bloody nightmare”, see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
They have been dumb, that’s for sure. However, a large part of the reason they were dumb is because of the regulatory process being, well … stupid. Not engineered well for actually executing projects. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need regulatory oversight, but it can be done in a more thoughtful way than it is currently.
These floating solar panels though, strike me as a general engineering nightmare.
That’s not strictly true at least of Flamanville and by extension HPC. They were refining the design as they were building Flamanville and kept having to rework whole sections which put a delay on HPC. Now granted there was funding issues and government flip flopping involved but the regulatory process is pretty clear in the UK around these kinds of things.
The quickest way to de-carbonize our grid is nuclear. Meanwhile the US closed Three Mile Island a few years ago and onlined more natural gas in the state and Germany closed several nuclear plants and onlined more coal plants. The anti-nuclear push is fucking stupid.
At least France is building nuclear like crazy. They have one of the most de-carbonized grids on the planet.
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If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn’t, so you don’t.
If these are too big then presumably it’ll block sunlight from that patch - that not a bad thing? I assume you’d need a lot for it to have an effect and the sea is pretty big…
I was wondering the same thing. Just considering algae, it absorbs a large portion of the world’s CO2. But the ocean is massive and a relatively tiny covered patch wouldn’t dent it much.
Add the fact that the solar panels would negate some of the need to burn fossil fuels, I think the outcome is more than net positive.
As far as any negative impact on wildlife and the biosphere, I’m sure it’s negative, but I don’t know much about it.
This is fucking stupid imo. We have more than enough land area for solar as it is. Why would you add 100x the complexity to your solar plant when you can just build it on land? Now you have to deal with tides, salt water corrosion, your technicians have to be scuba divers or something, running transmission lines through salt water is much harder than the ground. What happens when there’s an electrical fault that kills a bunch of people because they’re submerged in highly conductive salt water?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t have a lot of expertise on this topic, but my understanding is that tropical seas have some areas around reefs that are teeming with life and others that are relatively barren? So choosing a barren patch would seem the sensible option.
But I wonder. Even along reefs, there is this unfolding crisis of coral bleaching driven at least in part by global warming. Could a limited number of panels deployed in a loose fashion provide some shade and keep coastal waters cooler? Could this actually be beneficial to equatorial corals if done with care? There are a lot of assumptions here, though, and I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions.
If you look at the coral reef map, you can see that a huge portion of the sea in SEA is pretty barren.
Most of the sea in those region is pretty barren with mud/sand sea floor. As long as they don’t put it above a coral reef I imagine the ecological impact would be small. Might even have a positive impact because it might provide shelter for young fish in an otherwise barren patch of sea.
These are promising projects, Solar is worthwhile deploying and very economically viable. Where I have some concerns is that these are relatively expensive projects to do for Solar, the cost of the flotation and extra cabling and corrosion of the water all add to the costs. Its a lot cheaper to deploy it on roofs and we have countless enormous numbers of business/industrial roof space that could be used for this with much cheaper maintenance and installation closer to where the power is used.
I would much rather see us deploy more Solar across existing buildings and above obviously useful spaces as shade like like car parks than in the water where its relatively expensive. Still if they have done the maths and it works out then more power from the sun and less from burning ancient plants is all positive from me, but we can make our investment go further.
Agreed, smaller solares powering smaller things is the way to go. Like carpark shade to power the lights nearby
Anytime one of these big projects has something offshore, I have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more likely to be adopted if it were on land instead, if possible. Everything. EVERYTHING is more expensive when you’re putting it in the middle of miles of salt water.
