This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Of course this assumes those waters stay calm. Given how fast ocean and atmospheric currents are changing that does not seem like a safe assumption. Hurricanes are not likely to move into the region but that's not the only weather that can wreck big plates of brittle silicon.
*Limitless energy (some limitations apply)
Let's also consider the corroding effect of these being bathed in salt water 24/7. Will make them very expensive, particularly since you will have to go get on a boat to fix anything.
Yeah, my alma mater has been working on wave energy since I was a student there in the 90s. Dealing with the Ocean's corrosive environment as well as it flora and fauna is a major challenge. And at least wave power harvesters aren't hampered by bird poop.
The same can be said about pretty much every infrastructure project on the planet though. Earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, etc can all take down power grids of all types.
They all need maintenance, and the benefit of solar is that you can spend more on maintenance because you dont have to pay for incoming energy for processing.
No project is flawless, but maintain a grid of anodes and shooing away birds has definite benefits over digging up coal or uranium, or pumping oil and gas all over the place.
We cant let perfect be the enemy of good.
Just... Freaking... Deploy nuclear plants! We have the tech, we know they work, their footprint is small. Why the frack do we feel the need to chase these ridiculous zany ideas that face obvious fundamental engineering flaws, like, oh I don't know, STORMS and corrosion??? Maintaining these would be a bloody nightmare.
That's interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a "bloody nightmare", see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
They have been dumb, that's for sure. However, a large part of the reason they were dumb is because of the regulatory process being, well .. stupid. Not engineered well for actually executing projects. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely need regulatory oversight, but it can be done in a more thoughtful way than it is currently.
These floating solar panels though, strike me as a general engineering nightmare.
That's not strictly true at least of Flamanville and by extension HPC. They were refining the design as they were building Flamanville and kept having to rework whole sections which put a delay on HPC. Now granted there was funding issues and government flip flopping involved but the regulatory process is pretty clear in the UK around these kinds of things.
It's not either/or. We need to roll out everything we can, including solar and nuclear, as well as carbon removal tech.
Nuclear power plants have a massive footprint. For example in Australia they're planning to setup a new nuclear waste disposal facility with a forecast budget of half a trillion US Dollars and it will be full in 70 years time - they'll have to build a new one somewhere else after that.
That nuclear waste site will be radioactive for millions of years. The land will never be able to be used for basically anything, ever.
If you covered just that nuclear waste facility with solar panels, it would provide a massive amount of power. Enough to cover the day time power needs of a small country.
Solar panels aren't a "zany" idea. In fact one of the reasons it's being explored is because it would reduce evaporation. Power generation is often almost an afterthought. The panels also don't have to be ugly - in fact there are prototypes that are invisible. They just look like ordinary glass, and don't cost much more than glass either.
If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn't, so you don't.
This happens to solve another problem though, which is that decreasing cloud coverage in the Pacific is leading to increasing surface water temperatures
In fact, hot take: Why don't we deploy a solar power belt around the equator... AND nuclear power wherever we can put it? And while at it, let's make reprocessing of nuclear waste a must-do. It gives you more kWh/kg uranium, and the inevitable waste you do end up having is a cup instead of a cask, and far less dangerous for far shorter.
The quickest way to de-carbonize our grid is nuclear. Meanwhile the US closed Three Mile Island a few years ago and onlined more natural gas in the state and Germany closed several nuclear plants and onlined more coal plants. The anti-nuclear push is fucking stupid.
At least France is building nuclear like crazy. They have one of the most de-carbonized grids on the planet.
Building new nuclear capacity takes a lot more time than building wind turbines and solar parks though.
Sure shutting the existing ones off is a bad idea but building new ones isn't the way
Also the building part consumes a lot of CO2, too, so it takes a bit longer than with renewables until your are break even.
I feel like a lot of those pushing for Nuclear don't see how France is relying on neighbouring countries in the summer because of the rivers not carrying enough water or not being cold enough for protest cooling and that factor will only get worse - especially with ACs being absolutely essential in summer in the next 50 years.
Sure keeping a good amount of nuclear for base level is good but especially if you're also doing renewables it's far too inflexible to be good if you have a sunny day with a lot of wind - so you need huge energy storage anyway if you want to completely remove gas and oil and at that point renewables are better in using those than nuclear
If they perfect this cement battery concept a combination nuclear/solar/wind strategy would be the ideal. Solar/wind as much as possible and nuclear to react to deficit with excess stored into block foundations for all three of the above.
It's certainly promising, though the main problem is maintenance. Floating panels are obviously harder to fix than land-based ones, and seawater corrosion tends to be a big problem for any kind of long term infrastructure. Several countries are doing small scale trials to see how well the technology works in practice, before any kind of big rollout.
Anytime one of these big projects has something offshore, I have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more likely to be adopted if it were on land instead, if possible. Everything. EVERYTHING is more expensive when you’re putting it in the middle of miles of salt water.
Current power demand worldwide could be satisfied with around 115k sq miles of conventional panels. That’s around the size of Arizona or Bulgaria - which is a lot, but also a minuscule amount compared to the earths surface. There’s little need to put panels on the ocean, and it also puts the generation remote from most of the energy usage.
These are promising projects, Solar is worthwhile deploying and very economically viable. Where I have some concerns is that these are relatively expensive projects to do for Solar, the cost of the flotation and extra cabling and corrosion of the water all add to the costs. Its a lot cheaper to deploy it on roofs and we have countless enormous numbers of business/industrial roof space that could be used for this with much cheaper maintenance and installation closer to where the power is used.
I would much rather see us deploy more Solar across existing buildings and above obviously useful spaces as shade like like car parks than in the water where its relatively expensive. Still if they have done the maths and it works out then more power from the sun and less from burning ancient plants is all positive from me, but we can make our investment go further.
Agreed, smaller solares powering smaller things is the way to go. Like carpark shade to power the lights nearby
Yep solar is great but from what I learned while designing my own system, the big challenge there would be transferring the current or storing it without losing a lot. Solar panels typically generate small-ish DC voltages, which do not fare well when being transferred over long cables. They lose a lot of power over distance.
High voltage AC is the way to transfer the juice. Also probably challenging in the ocean, but IDK.
