Floating photovoltaic systems, or “floatovoltaics,” provide electricity and reduce evaporation. Plus, you don’t need to clear land for a solar farm.
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.
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