Floating Solar

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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.

As a child, as children do, I discover light by reflection: the sun glistening in the aftermath of rain, or the moon scattered across the placid lake or fluctuating ocean. It was not a literal thing for me, but rather a place that suggested dreams and abstractions. Thus, it was more than a technical discovery that the sun was the center around which we, as a planet, or a place, or even the play a small child revolved, and it was very much a real thing known as heat, energy, and other essential, very literal aspects of my life. Sun suddenly was no longer an abstraction, but a most powerful utility that is, most literally, the force that drives the world.

It was very easy for me to understand the concept of solar energy and to embrace the practicality of the 24 solar panels on my roof that provides for ALL my electrical needs, save for a $12 dollar tax that I cannot avoid. When a solar farm was proposed for my town, as a planning board commissioner, I welcomed the idea that this was a desirable contribution to the community as a provider contractually providing free electricity to the town, from its streetlights, to its school, and to its municipal building: the Town Hall and two volunteer fire stations, AND offer a 15% rate discount to my property owning neighbors who could certainly enjoy the budget relief. Solar energy seems so indisputable obvious to me; I see it as pure opportunity at every level of scale and application.

There have ensued some opposition to the land use, the solar arrays occupying open fields even when those fields are no longer productive agriculturally. And then, ingenious inventors, in Japan and China, came up with the idea of floating solar, panels arrayed on the surface of reservoirs, abandoned mines and sandpits, and other passive water bodies to provide an alternative locus with integrated use for electrical use to include purification and treatment, aquaculture, offshore generation, and more. Additional benefits include reduced land costs and public opposition, less destructive installation, and massive reduction in evaporation loss and algae blooms.

A 2026 article in The New Climate post on Medium by Tim Smedley provides stunning examples: in the Netherlands the Bomhosplas Solar Park on an 18 acre sand pit lake is a 27.4 megawatt project powering 7,200 homes; in India, the Maydhya Pradesh project uses 219, 270 panels to produce 120 Megawatts; Germany, an arrangement of vertical panels covering just 5% of a gravel pit lake is designed to produce an annual output of 2 GWh or 2 billion watt hours; in North Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore, projects of similar size are operational. And in China, in Shangdong Province, the Dongying site occupies 1233 hectares of shallow coastal waters, 8 kilometers from shore, at a depth of 4 meters, encompassing 3,000 photovoltaic platforms, the world’s first one-gigawatt plant offshore. And in Africa, with Chinese technology and finance, a facility at the Kariba Dam in Zimbabwe, will comprise 1.8 million floating panels, in an area of 10 kilometers square is to come online in 2026 in three phases over five years.

As usual, the US, slave to oil, and starved for imagination and political courage, is embarrassingly behind. In Petaluma, California, an array on a 17-acre treatment pond at the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility will reduce the city’s reliance on the conventional power grid saving some $500,000 a year and reducing water rates and other energy expenses. By comparison to other nations predicting the possibility of 100% energy production just from floating solar in the near future , this California dreaming seems a pathetic indicator of recalcitrance and failed imagination.

As children, we are warned not to look directly into the sun lest we be blinded. What a paradox to deny the natural power of the sun when it burns so visibly, so immediately as light toward our salvation.

We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.

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