In the last week, workers switched to a solar energy facility that can produce 40 megawatts of electricity floating on an artificial lake in China’s Anhui province near Huainan. Huainan, according to Sarah Zheng at the South China Morning Post. This is the biggest floating solar farm worldwide. However, it is growing at a rapid pace. China is creating new renewable energy projects it’s likely to keep the title for a while.
It was built through Sungrow Power Supply; the power plant will generate enough energy to power 15,000 households, Zheng reports. While the company has not revealed the exact size of the operation, it produces twice as much energy as the previous holder of the largest-floating-solar-plant title, located in the same area. It was launched by the company Xinyi Solar in 2016.
Anhui Province is an abundant coal province as its Sungrow plant is situated on the shores of a lake which was once the location of intense mining operations. A torrential rain filled the region with water. According to Zhen, the water’s level can vary between 12 and 30 feet.
Why do solar farms have to be built on the surface of reservoirs and lakes? Fiona Harvey at The Guardian explains that constructing solar plants on water bodies, particularly artificial lakes that aren’t ecologically sensitive, can help protect land for agriculture and terrestrial ecosystems from getting cultivated to generate energy. The water also cools components of the solar panels, which allows them to function more efficiently, says Alistair Boyle for The Telegraph. The same reason Britain constructed a tower of 23,000 solar panels floating, located in the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir near Heathrow Airport in 2016, to provide power for the Thames Water treatment plant.
Its Sungrow solar plant is one small piece of China’s efforts to develop renewable energy. In the words of Irina Slav from Business Insider, the nation recently announced that it will invest $361 billion in renewable energy until 2020. It is expected that by 2022, it could generate 325 gigawatts of wind power and solar power and 350 gigawatts of hydropower. Zheng says that renewables makeup 11 percent of the energy consumed in China and could increase to 20 percent in 2030.
Although the floating solar power plant is the largest in the world, its size is a tinker compared to China’s solar projects that aren’t floating. For instance, the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, situated on the Tibetan plateau, is home to four million solar cells, which generate 850 megawatts of power. But that is about to be replaced by an ambitious project within the Ningxia Autonomous Region, which will be home to six million solar panels and generate 2 gigawatts of energy.