‘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)
The same can be said about pretty much every infrastructure project on the planet though. Earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, etc can all take down power grids of all types.
They all need maintenance, and the benefit of solar is that you can spend more on maintenance because you dont have to pay for incoming energy for processing.
No project is flawless, but maintain a grid of anodes and shooing away birds has definite benefits over digging up coal or uranium, or pumping oil and gas all over the place.
We cant let perfect be the enemy of good.
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.
It’s not either/or. We need to roll out everything we can, including solar and nuclear, as well as carbon removal tech.
Nuclear power plants have a massive footprint. For example in Australia they’re planning to setup a new nuclear waste disposal facility with a forecast budget of half a trillion US Dollars and it will be full in 70 years time - they’ll have to build a new one somewhere else after that.
That nuclear waste site will be radioactive for millions of years. The land will never be able to be used for basically anything, ever.
If you covered just that nuclear waste facility with solar panels, it would provide a massive amount of power. Enough to cover the day time power needs of a small country.
Solar panels aren’t a “zany” idea. In fact one of the reasons it’s being explored is because it would reduce evaporation. Power generation is often almost an afterthought. The panels also don’t have to be ugly - in fact there are prototypes that are invisible. They just look like ordinary glass, and don’t cost much more than glass either.
Half a trillion dollars over seventy years is nothing. How large is the waste site compared to the habitable surface? A few square kilometers is nothing.
The power needs of a small country is also essentially nothing over a seventy year span.
Nuclear energy is not ideal but it beats the hell out of coal plants, and it gives us a bridge to something sustainable. Solar has its own drawbacks and no nation is going to maintain a bunch of floating panels out in the ocean.
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.
This happens to solve another problem though, which is that decreasing cloud coverage in the Pacific is leading to increasing surface water temperatures
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.
Building new nuclear capacity takes a lot more time than building wind turbines and solar parks though.
Sure shutting the existing ones off is a bad idea but building new ones isn’t the way
Also the building part consumes a lot of CO2, too, so it takes a bit longer than with renewables until your are break even.
I feel like a lot of those pushing for Nuclear don’t see how France is relying on neighbouring countries in the summer because of the rivers not carrying enough water or not being cold enough for protest cooling and that factor will only get worse - especially with ACs being absolutely essential in summer in the next 50 years.
Sure keeping a good amount of nuclear for base level is good but especially if you’re also doing renewables it’s far too inflexible to be good if you have a sunny day with a lot of wind - so you need huge energy storage anyway if you want to completely remove gas and oil and at that point renewables are better in using those than nuclear
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If they perfect this cement battery concept a combination nuclear/solar/wind strategy would be the ideal. Solar/wind as much as possible and nuclear to react to deficit with excess stored into block foundations for all three of the above.
In fact, hot take: Why don’t we deploy a solar power belt around the equator… AND nuclear power wherever we can put it? And while at it, let’s make reprocessing of nuclear waste a must-do. It gives you more kWh/kg uranium, and the inevitable waste you do end up having is a cup instead of a cask, and far less dangerous for far shorter.
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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…
Yeah, any time I see one of these “big ideas!” I’m super skeptical… our solutions aren’t going to be easy innovations. They’re going to be hard, boring fixes.
One benefit is “cooling” the water underneath as we’re running into record high sea temps.
Smaller panels spread out would be better since they can let in a decent average amount of light vs a big ass panel blocking everything in one area. But then you run into the issues of connecting all of those panels and that makes getting the power out of the ocean and into your house even harder.
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.
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?
If you had read even the first sentence of the article, you might’ve learned that just maybe they have a reason to not use land.
Not enough land.
Not every place is like central Africa or Ohio. Basically all coastal regions near the equator (which are the only places they are recommending this) are densely populated. To get the amount of solar panels they suggest, you would have to go far inland (if there is any inland) and have many more much smaller solar plants, and that’s more maintenance than single giant solar field, though as you’ve said, I’m sure on the sea comes with it’s own maintenance problems.
The article also talks about waves, wind and other environmental affects, and shows all the places where the “defences” against the environment wouldn’t have to be strong or expensive.
They most definitely don’t suggest that this be used everywhere. The main example they talked about is Indonesia. Extremely densely populated with little suitable land for solar plants.
TLDR: In most places this is stupid… but they never suggested that. There are certain places where it is viable and possibly the only option for large solar farms.
It would affect the small area underneath, though we are struggling with ocean warming atm so anything blocking sunlight in is probably good.
It’s certainly promising, though the main problem is maintenance. Floating panels are obviously harder to fix than land-based ones, and seawater corrosion tends to be a big problem for any kind of long term infrastructure. Several countries are doing small scale trials to see how well the technology works in practice, before any kind of big rollout.
If they’d spend time researching ways to prevent any kind of corrosion in the first place we wouldn’t need as much maintenance. As for cleaning them hell just have them submerge themselves 1 time a day or week or whatever and come back up. Or research ways to make it 100% hydrophobic and…dustphobic? Is that a word? Lol. That would allow for even less maintenance.
Unfortunately that style of research takes tons of time and tests and here’s the big one that ruins it all in the first place : money. Money is what will make all of what i just said not happen in the first place. People would rather slap some cheap shit down instead of paying a larger sum 1 time and be done with it.
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.
Current power demand worldwide could be satisfied with around 115k sq miles of conventional panels. That’s around the size of Arizona or Bulgaria - which is a lot, but also a minuscule amount compared to the earths surface. There’s little need to put panels on the ocean, and it also puts the generation remote from most of the energy usage.
Room temperature superconductor (if it’s real) changes the game. We could pave the southwest in panels and send the power where it needs to go.
It’s such a weird nerdy thing. And, yeah, if it’s true and manufacturable, the rest of this century is going to be fucking wild.
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
Yep solar is great but from what I learned while designing my own system, the big challenge there would be transferring the current or storing it without losing a lot. Solar panels typically generate small-ish DC voltages, which do not fare well when being transferred over long cables. They lose a lot of power over distance.
High voltage AC is the way to transfer the juice. Also probably challenging in the ocean, but IDK.
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