Keeping the land clear for useful projects is vital to some countries that have limited space and that have to manage it as tightly as possible.
If those countries will want to rely on solar power in the future, they’ll have to find solutions for managing their solar fields and the land is just not proper for that in some cases. But water bodies are.
Solaris Synergy, a company from Israel, wants to build large scale floating concentrated photovoltaics. They have already designed and prototyped a 1 KW unit floating onto their roof, as a proof of concept, and got an award at the Clean Tech Open IDEAS Competition.
CPV systems have been so far used on land, and putting them on water bodies poses a series of issues, such as managing the concentration levels, what waters are to be used (oceans, seas, lakes). There are also a lot of benefits associated with heat dissipation, which is not a problem anymore in water.
Moreover, the company’s innovation addressed the issue of aesthetics, which drew a lot of complaints from people whose sights had been disturbed by fields of solar panels, and from biologists, who complained about the number of dead insects drawn to them.
The Solaris researchers now plan to build a 200 kW system in an Israeli water reservoir later this year, a huge step forward from the 1KW prototype they have installed in their backyard (roof, respectively).
I would be interested in harvesting as much solar power as possible for a housing development project. A design that is aesthetically pleasing and on that blends in well with the environment.