Project Briefing

With an electricity mix currently dominated by fossil fuels and limited land availability for ground-mounted projects, Singapore is turning to floating PV (FPV) to increase its renewables capacity as it aims for 2GW of deployed solar by 2030.

On 10 April 2020, South Africa’s biggest solar PV complex to date sprang into operation as the final phase was completed. The timing was extremely fortunate, just a day ahead of the country’s government announcing a nationwide lockdown as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to spread worldwide.

In August 2019, a team at BayWa r.e. began construction of its 14.5MWp Sekdoornfloating solar project near the town of Zwolle in the Netherlands. Just eight weeks later, it was complete, 40,000 solar panels afloat on the former sandpit.

When solar meets science. Inside GridServes’ ground-breaking York Solar Farm.

It is ironic that Spain, whose government is infamous for its history of damaging PV policy U-turns, is also now home to the figurehead project of large-scale solar’s return in Europe after years of hiatus. The Don Rodrigo project in the southern region of Andalusia is the first mega-scale PV system to go without subsidies on the continent, standing at 175MW capacity.

While Filipino policymakers pondered a controversial bill that would allow a solar company to set up a micro-grid and transmission franchise aiming to improve power supply across the country, a small town on the island of Mindoro was already enjoying round-the-clock electricity for the first time ever. The town of Paluan, situated in the northwest corner of Mindoro, the seventh largest island in the Philippines, dominated by an agricultural society and dubbed ‘the brownout capital of the Philippines’, is receiving power from Southeast Asia’s largest micro-grid, combining solar PV, energy storage and diesel technology.

Amid reports of logistical and bureaucratic difficulties, Germany’s IB Vogt earlier this year became the first company to complete and energise one of the multiple projects that will eventually make up Benban, Egypt’s gargantuan solar park in the western desert governorate of Aswan.

In April of this year, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, drew scorn when he announced that every village across India had access to electricity. The reality that ‘electrification’ in government terminology meant that a mere 10% of households in any one village had power, was not made clear in the initial announcements.

Delhi-headquartered renewable energy firm Hero Future Energies has completed India’s first largescale solar and wind energy hybrid project in the state of Karnataka. The project at Kavithal, Raichur District, which included an existing 50MW wind farm, now has a neighbouring 28.8MW solar PV site to form a hybrid system.

The technical feasibility of floating solar PV and its long-term durability have often been questioned, but this year’s commissioning of a giant project on a lake in eastern China has launched the technology into the global spotlight.