https://archive.md/ETNaL
"With the price of solar power cratering by 85 percent during the 2010s, the
question is no longer whether it’s economically feasible to deploy the
technology on a large scale. Now it’s: Where can’t we put solar panels?
Governments are handing out tax breaks to get people to install them at home,
but we can also put them in the empty space around airports and over ugly
parking lots, or slap them on rooftop gardens and in agricultural fields and
grow crops under them, simultaneously generating power and food.
So how about laying a bunch of solar panels on reservoirs? Floating
photovoltaic systems, also known as floatovoltaics, could be a powerful
complement to the hydroelectric power already generated by a reservoir
and
save water by shading it and reducing evaporation.
A new study by an international team of researchers shows just how useful
wide-scale floatovoltaics could be. They calculate that covering 30 percent of
the surface of 115,000 reservoirs globally could generate 9,434 terawatt hours
of power a year. That’s more than twice the energy the entire United States
generates annually, and enough to fully power over 6,200 cities in 124
countries.
“That’s remarkable, this 9,434-terawatt-hours-per-year potential,” says J.
Elliott Campbell, an environmental engineer at the University of California,
Santa Cruz and coauthor of the paper, which was published today in
Nature
Sustainability. “It’s about 10 times today’s generation from solar. And solar
is growing like crazy. If there was ever a time to ask where to put all this
stuff, it’s now.”
Floatovoltaics work just like solar panels on land, only they’re … floating.
Each one is a cluster or “island” of panels, built atop a buoyant mounting
platform and anchored to the bottom of the water body by cables. Every other
row of panels is a walkway for crews to do electrical maintenance or
inspections.
The systems are of course built to resist rust, but so are terrestrial panels,
which are exposed to rain. “The electrical system is really no different than a
rooftop system or a ground mount system,” says Chris Bartle, director of sales
and marketing at Ciel & Terre USA, which deploys floatovoltaic projects around
the world. “We’ve taken essentially old technology from the marina world—docks
and buoys and whatnot—and applied that to building a structure that an array of
solar panels can be mounted to. It’s really as simple as that.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-global-malaria-lgbtq-warriors-river-albania/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
