Singapore’s Sunseap Group has announced it will be developing an “offshore” floating solar farm in Johore Strait.
Johore Strait runs between Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia, spanning a distance of around 60 kilometres.
As you can see by the depiction above, calling the project offshore or sea-based is probably a bit of a stretch. In the general area where the installation will occur, the distance across the Strait is anywhere from around 1km to approximately 1.6km. However, the solar panels being in a tidal salt water environment and busy aquatic thoroughfare will no doubt create some challenges – most “floatovoltaic” projects occur on bodies of fresh water..
Sunseap says the 5MW floating solar power system will cover an area of 5 hectares and generate about 6,388 MWh of clean electricity annually.
“Our floating solar system supports Singapore’s ambition to be a solar hub for Asia, and we hope it will ignite more deployment of alternative methods of tapping solar energy,” said Frank Phuan, Co-founder and CEO of Sunseap Group.
Floating solar is of particular interest in Singapore, where population density is around 7,900 people per square kilometer of land area. 5.6 million people are packed into an area of just 721.5 km². While rooftop solar power is making headway in the island city-state, land is at such a premium that large- scale ground mount solar farms aren’t really viable.
This won’t be Sunseap’s first aquatic PV project. It was also involved with a 1MW test installation in Singapore at Tengeh Reservoir.
Sunseap claims it is responsible for the majority of grid-connected solar power systems in Singapore, boasting more than 160 megawatts of contracted solar project capacity.
It also has a pipeline of projects in Cambodia, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia; including a 168 MW solar farm in Vietnam, a 62 MW project in the Philippines and a 10 MW utility scale farm in Cambodia.
The Australian project is Shell Australia’s 250MW Delga Solar Farm, to be constructed at a site approximately 25 kilometres south-west of Wandoan in Queensland. Last year, Shell invested an undisclosed sum in Sunseap Group, with view to collaboration on solar projects in the Asia Pacific.
Not so long ago, Shell had embraced renewables to the degree that it even produced solar panels. It distanced itself from solar energy around the time it really started to take off, but through Showa Shell Sekiyu Kabushiki Kaisha, the base of Royal Dutch Shell group in Japan, retained a toe-hold through ownership of CIS solar panel manufacturer Solar Frontier.
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I see the picture above includes roofs without solar. Aerial photos of Singapore show they have plenty of roofs where they could locate panels. With their residential electricity price of 25.6 Australian cents per kilowatt-hour rooftop solar makes a lot of sense. But if they solve some of the engineering challenges of floating solar panels in the ocean it opens up some interesting possibilities.
Mmmm, water cooled no doubt. That should put up the panel efficiency!