Submerged and Floating Photovoltaic Systems: Modelling, Design and Case Studies

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

The electric energy sector throughout the world is briefly analyzed with particular attention to renewable energy systems (RES) and to photovoltaic (PV) sources. The importance of floating PV solutions is discussed both on freshwater basins and on the sea. The availability of large water surfaces near urban areas is the trump card of this new technology, together with its lesser environmental impact. Other advantages of the floating solution are discussed and trends in costs and scale economies are suggested.

Keywords

Renewable energy systems; PV floating and submerged; Cost and futures trends

1 Renewable Energy Penetration

Energy demand is continuously increasing worldwide and the electric sector is becoming progressively important. The electric sector represented 42% of energy demands in 2015 and this percentage will rise to 47% in the next 20 years [1]. At the same time, there is a dramatic parallel environmental crisis due to the burning of fossil fuels and, in particular, due to the electric energy production.

This crisis must be tackled and the most promising prospect is constituted by the expansion of renewable energy sources (RES). This is why, in the last few years, investments in RES (excluding the large and more stable hydroelectric sector) have registered a 12% yearly increase in the installed power in the last 20 years. This trend is likely to continue in the next 20 years at a level of 7.1% [1].

Two main competing technologies have emerged in the course of the last two decades: wind farms and solar plants. Photovoltaic (PV) fields and large wind turbines have a great visible impact, and today have become very popular, flanking the more important, if less showy, hydroelectric sector. The penetration of these two technologies in most industrialized countries and the dumping of their costs are processes which suggest that, within the next few years, the scenario of the energy world will undergo a structural change.

But how long will this process last? Can RES completely replace fossil (and nuclear) energy plants? What will the time scale be?

The answers to these questions must face a two-pronged problem:

• Power density. While traditional thermal energy plants, powered with fossil or nuclear fuels, are highly concentrated structures with a typical size of 1 GW or more, both solar plants and wind farms need very large areas for energy harvesting, and therefore entail a problem of land occupancy.

• Energy availability. The energy produced with thermal plants is produced continuously and has, therefore, two fundamental advantages: it is constantly available and can be modulated according to the needs of the end user. Biomass and geothermal energy are also constantly available whereas solar energy, wind, and even hydroelectric sources have intrinsic limitations due to the intermittency of their energy yield.

Because of the structural need for large surfaces and because of the intermittency of the energy output, solar energy still represents only a small percentage of energy production, as shown in Fig. 1, which captures electric energy production at the end of 2015 [2].

Fig. 1 RES in the electric sector (worldwide data, end 2015) [ 2].

If we wish to tilt the balance in favor of RES and fully develop solar potentialities so that they are competitive with fossil fuels, two distinct problems need to be solved: the availability of large surfaces and the issue of energy storage.

The wind energy sector has partially solved the problem of land occupancy. The production of huge wind turbines triggered a great expansion in this sector, which reached 3.7% of the total worldwide production in 2015. The availability of off-shore technology contributed to this trend, and 24% of wind power installed in Europe in 2015 was constituted by off-shore wind turbines [3].

The PV sector could adopt a strategy similar to that used in the wind sector by finding large areas for huge PV installations. However, this is more complex. Large surfaces with intense solar radiation can be found but, if used for PV, they would be not available for other purposes, and land in industrialized zones is very expensive. Notwithstanding these problems, a great effort has been made in this direction, with plants of up to 500 MW having been installed so far, and further efforts will be made in the future [4].

In this perspective, the floating photovoltaic (FPV) solution is a perfectly viable and feasible strategy. Its extension to submerged PV plants will be also discussed. The two technologies are different but the basic principle is the same: exploit large existing water surfaces and profit from the water as a useful medium for managing a large plant of PV modules. We show two examples of floating plants in Figs. 2 and 3: one fixed and one with a tracking system. In Fig. 4 the rendering of a large submerged plant is shown.

Fig. 2 Floating PV plant: fixed plant, 100 kWp Singapore.

Fig. 3 Floating PV plant: plant with tracking, 200 kWp Suvereto (Italy).

Fig. 4 Rendering of submerged PV plant.

2 Floating and Submerged PV Plants: Where?

As mentioned above, the large-scale deployment of PV energy entails the use of a significant amount of land. According to the data reported in Ref. [5] for the United States, the capacity-weighted average land use for large PV plants ranges from 0.42 (fixed) to 0.27 (1-axis) MWp/ha, while more recent research on land use and the so-called geographic PV potential suggests that the power installable for a fixed plant is 0.5–0.7 MWp/ha [6]. The concept of geographic potential can be extended to water surfaces. In this case, however, we would be working with technical problems which are very different from land-based PV plants and we would be able to arrange the modules more compactly. In floating plants values increase to more than 1 MWp/ha (see Chapter 8).

It should be noted that land hunger, land cost, and land management heavily affect the PV sector. Large areas of free land are not normally available in developed countries, and the growth of human settlements in industrialized countries generates the demand for strong power units concentrated in a limited space, which pollute very large areas and trigger issues of air quality and CO2 emissions.

However, it must be observed that wherever human settlements are built, water is also present. It can be found in a variety of forms such as lakes, sea, large artificial basins built for various purposes (water storage, irrigation, or civil use), wastewater treatment, hydroelectric basins, abandoned mines, etc. These very large existing surfaces suggest a very simple solution to the problem of power/surface limitations: they could be used to install FPV plants.

Furthermore, in most cases, around or next to basins or lakes, there are human settlements which are already equipped with an electricity grid, if not with electric power plants. In the United States, 78% of the electricity is used in states bordering an ocean or a Great Lake [7].

But how large are these surfaces? Can they account for a substantial expansion of the PV sector and increase its contribution to RES? A simple analysis of the available water surfaces shows that very large freshwater basins are available everywhere. For example, in Sicily, one of the driest regions in Italy, there are over 75 km² of large freshwater basins [8]. Even more can be found by taking into account small irrigation basins and water reservoirs suitable for FPV plants, because PV installations favor water saving and water quality control.

2.1 Freshwater Surfaces

Table 1 shows the values of freshwater surfaces, the installable FPV power (the so-called technical power potential, PVPP) if only α SW= 1% of these surfaces are used, and the corresponding potential energy production (technical energy potential, PVEP) for extended regions worldwide: tropic, temperate, and cold zones [9] (see Chapter 8).

Table 1

Technical PV potential for climate zones

It should be noted that, notwithstanding this conservative estimate, the potential energy which could be installed on freshwater basins is 6069 TWh and which would cover about the 25% of the entire world production of electric energy, which in 2015 was 24,215 TWh [1].

This potential is enormous: even considering that many large basins are not easily or immediately exploitable, the numbers are impressive and clearly indicate the advantages that would accrue from the exploitation of these untapped resources.

For example, the available freshwater surfaces in Italy amount to 7200 km² of natural lakes or basins (including artificial hydroelectric basins) [8], and this number does not include a great many small artificial basins connected to industrial activities, irrigation, or wastewater treatment.

Although these data are not available for all the regions, it is important to note that we are dealing with very large areas in the proximity of towns or otherwise heavily populated areas.

We estimate that in Italy over 10 GW of floating plants could be installed by covering just 1% of the existing freshwater basin areas without modifying their final use and with only a very limited impact on the environment.

2.2 Seawater

The extension of the PV floating solution to the sea (to near-shore and off-shore plants) multiplies the potential of water surfaces.

Obviously, the simplest solutions cannot be found in the open ocean where very large waves have a destructive impact and where the distances between the floating plant, the end users, and the interconnected electricity grid heavily increase the costs and the technical challenges. Rather, the idea is to build floating structures not too distant from the coastline, and to choose locations with a natural (or artificial) limit to wave strength.

Recently, the IJsselmeer basin in the Netherlands, a 1100 km² seawater enclosure bordered by weirs, has been identified by the Dutch government as a possible location to install both wind farms and floating plants [10]. Very large wind turbines will be placed in this low-depth basin which could, at the same time, accommodate large floating plants and supply energy during sunny days when the wind speed is greatly reduced [11].

This kind of situation is very frequent (the Persian Gulf is another example) and the available surfaces are practically unlimited, especially in equatorial regions.

The problems of a FPV on seawater are twofold: salt corrosion and wave impact. However, both problems are not insurmountable and can be managed as shown in tests carried out by a research group in Malta [12].

3 The Advantages of PV on Water: Land Saving, Cooling, Tracking, and Storage

FPV plants open up new opportunities that have not been fully explored. In a paper on FPV in Brazil [13] some advantages of this new technique are discussed with particular regard to water quality, environment, and energy harvesting. The following is a detailed list:

1. No land occupancy. The main advantage of floating or submerged PV plants is that they do not take up any land, except the limited surfaces necessary for an electric cabinet. FPV plants are not merely more economical than land-based plants, but they provide mainly, and above all, a way to avoid competing with agricultural or green zones [6]. Also, unlike land-based PV plants, floating, or submerged plants have a limited impact on the landscape and the surface occupancy is reduced.

2. Installation and decommissioning. FPV plants are more compact than land-based plants, their management is simpler, and their construction and decommissioning are straightforward. The main point is that no fixed structures exist and the mooring of floating systems can be carried out in a totally reversible way, unlike the foundations used for a land-based plant.

3. Water saving and water quality. The partial coverage of basins has additional benefits such as the reduction of water evaporation. This result depends on climate conditions and on the percentage of the covered surface. In arid climates such as Australia, this is an important advantage since more than 80% of the evaporation of the covered surface is saved and this means more than 20,000 m³/year/ha (a very useful feature, especially if the basin is used for irrigation purposes). A parallel advantage is the containment of the problem of algae bloom, which is especially serious in industrialized countries [14]. The partial coverage of the basins and the reduction of light on biological fouling just below the surface, together with active systems (see Chapter 8) can solve this problem.

4. Cooling and tracking. The floating structure allows the implementation of a simple and cheap cooling and tracking mechanism. As is well known, one of the limits of PV plants is that they lose efficiency during the hot season as a consequence of the thermal drift effect. In the case of a floating or submerged PV plant, this effect can be substantially reduced by the presence of water cooling, thus gaining 10% or more in yearly energy harvesting [15]. A large floating platform can be easily turned and can perform a vertical axis tracking, which can be done without wasting energy and without the need for any complex mechanical apparatus, which is needed in land-based PV plants. Moreover, a FPV plant equipped with a tracking system has a limited additional cost, while the gain in energy can range from 15% to 25% (see Chapter 5). In several cases, the technical effort necessary to implement this solution gives a sizeable reduction of the final kWh cost.

5. Reflector and gray energy. The tracking system suggests that low-intensity concentrators with aluminum reflectors should be used. This technique was adopted at the very beginning of the PV era [16], but was not fully developed because of the high cost of the tracking systems that are unavoidable in most reflector systems. The low cost of a tracking system in an FPV plant makes the use of concentrators with aluminum reflectors once more viable and this could allow a reduction of gray energy, the energy necessary to produce the PV plant itself (see Chapter 6).

6. Storage systems. Finally, important advantages come from the possibility of integrating FPV plants with storage systems. As already mentioned, the problem of the intermittency and of the periodic blackout of the solar energy source can be partially solved by using a smart grid approach. However, when the contribution of solar and wind energy increases substantially, all the smart solutions break down and all the grids show obvious limits. Therefore, the development of large cheap storage systems is absolutely necessary [17]. Consequently, we pay great attention to the two most interesting existing storage systems suitable for large power plants: hydroelectric pumping, and CAES (compressed air energy