A PhD student from Togo found a way to keep solar panels “alive” on frozen Canadian lakes using little more than foam and bubbling air that quietly stops ice from forming beneath them
Image created with artificial intelligenceSolar panels and frozen lakes don’t belong in the same sentence — at least not in any engineer’s comfort zone. Yet floating solar, a technology that spent years being dismissed as a novelty, has quietly crossed 10 gigawatts of cumulative installed capacity worldwide. Cold climates, however, have remained stubbornly out of reach.
That may be starting to change. A PhD student from Togo, studying electrical engineering at a Canadian university, has been testing a system that sounds almost improvised — and the early results are hard to ignore.
Floating solar’s decade of growth — and its cold-climate blind spot
Floating solar PV has had a remarkably fast rise. A decade ago, attaching panels to pontoons and setting them adrift on reservoirs seemed like an engineering curiosity at best. Today it’s a proven segment of the global solar industry, with an estimated 1.5 to 2 gigawatts installed in 2025 alone — enough to push cumulative worldwide capacity past 10 GW.
That’s not a criticism of the work — it’s the honest gap between a promising finding and a technology that shows up on a project bid.
The technology earned that growth. Early proponents argued that water bodies cool the panels, boosting efficiency, while the panels themselves reduce evaporation from reservoirs. Both benefits proved real, and investors followed.
But floating solar grew up in warm climates. The engineering assumptions baked into standard systems — plastic pontoon bases, no insulation, no ice management — reflect that origin. Cold regions were largely left out of the picture. The panels can’t float if the water beneath them turns solid, and temperatures that might seem panel-friendly actually create a different set of efficiency problems. Nobody had built a system specifically designed to handle all of that. Until recently.
A PhD student’s unconventional fix: foam slabs and bubbling air
Koami Soulemane Hayibo grew up in Togo and is now pursuing a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada. His research focuses on a deceptively simple question: can floating solar actually work in a country where lakes freeze?
His answer involves two components that, on paper, sound almost too low-tech. He replaced standard plastic pontoon bases with polyethylene foam slabs. The panels sit on these slabs and float roughly one centimeter above the water surface — a small gap that matters more than it might seem. The foam provides built-in thermal insulation, keeping panels from shedding the heat they need to stay efficient when temperatures drop.
In warm climates, water cooling is an asset. In cold climates, it works against you. The foam addresses that directly.
The second component is an air bubbler system integrated beneath the panels. It pushes air through the water to prevent ice from forming under the floating array. The energy required to run the bubblers is minimal, which matters enormously for the economics — a solution that burns significant power to solve a cold-weather problem would undercut the whole point of generating solar energy in the first place. Together, these two elements form a system designed from the ground up for cold-climate conditions, not adapted from a warm-climate template.
What the research actually found
The results, published in the journal Applied Energy, gave Hayibo and his co-authors something concrete to work with. Foam-based floating PV generated more energy annually compared to conventional floating PV models when evaluated under cold-climate conditions. That advantage wasn’t incidental — the researchers linked it directly to more accurate temperature modeling, which they identified as a gap in existing floating solar research.
The study also documented a water conservation benefit: the panels reduced evaporation from the water bodies they covered, a co-benefit observed in warm-climate floating solar before, now confirmed in cold-climate contexts as well.
The finding that co-author Joshua M. Pearce flagged as most significant was economic. “The foam-based FPV was economic while solving the issue of FPV in cold climates,” Pearce told pv magazine. Technical functionality matters, but a system that works yet costs too much to deploy at scale doesn’t move the needle. Economic viability is what separates a promising prototype from a potential product.
From research prototype to real-world deployment: the open question
Small-scale research success is not the same as commercial viability. That’s not a criticism of the work — it’s the honest gap between a promising finding and a technology that shows up on a project bid.
The researchers are clear-eyed about this. Their own conclusion frames the findings as “a solid foundation for future research at larger scales and across diverse water bodies.” Measured, appropriate language. It doesn’t oversell what’s been demonstrated so far.
The floating solar industry has navigated this gap before, though. Early floating PV faced genuine skepticism — anchoring solar arrays to water surfaces struck many observers as impractical. The technology proved them wrong, one installation at a time, until the economics became undeniable.
Whether foam-and-bubbler systems follow the same arc depends on factors the research can’t yet answer: how the materials hold up over years of freeze-thaw cycles, how installation and maintenance costs scale at larger deployments, and whether manufacturers see a market in cold-climate regions large enough to justify investment in production.
Those are the questions worth watching. Cold-climate countries — Canada, Scandinavia, parts of Central Asia — represent significant untapped potential for floating solar. If Hayibo’s system proves itself at larger scales, it could open a geography the floating solar industry has essentially written off. That’s not a small thing.
The full study is available here: Hayibo, K. S., Rahman, M. M., & Pearce, J. M. (2026). Design and thermal-energy performance analysis of foam-based floating photovoltaic systems in a cold climate: experimental results from a 7 kW floatovoltaics in Canada. Applied Energy, 420, 128159.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
