5th Annual Floating Solar PV Forum

Floating solar is an emerging concept that make use of a portion of surface water bodies for siting grid-tied solar energy systems. As solar PV system prices fall and reliability improves, there is more and more pressure to find suitable sites for grid-tied centralized systems, especially in areas where land use is a critical restraint, and floating solar offers an attractive alternative to land-based systems. Floating solar can open new opportunities for scaling up the solar power generating capacity, especially in countries with high population density and competing uses for available land. At present, countries including China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have installed floating solar plants with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, enough to power 240,000 households.

Floating solar represents a growing opportunity for developers to install solar in countries that are land constrained, or in specific locations that have favorable conditions such as water bodies with proximity to existing grids, such as hydropower dams or water treatment plants where they can use of existing infrastructure to make floating PV more cost competitive. Offshore installations at pilot stage are proving successful and are being closely monitored as they increase in size. However, in some cases floating solar will continue to be a relatively niche technology as countries, and developers consider it a relatively expensive method of installing solar compared to ground-mount solar on land and roof-top solar especially with regard to stringent requirements of anchoring, insurance, permits and water surface rights.

The 5th Annual Floating Solar PV Forum offers an ideal opportunity to obtain comprehensive and in-depth information about floating PV. Various aspects of floating PV will be presented and discussed in several sessions: From market developments and first-hand best practice examples on lakes and off the coast, to financing possibilities and technical challenges above and below the water surface. The stage is set for energy leaders to steer us into a new world. Opportunity exists to reimagine, recreate and redefine our society in a new and greener image with renewable energy at its beating heart.