Japan Floats New Solar Capacity

What do they do at night?

Del

Cmon Del your critiques are usually more thoughtful than that. We've all been round the balanced basket of energy supply and that power X homes is always just a total and takes no account of peak usages; besides which its the industrial usage that really counts.

Anyway

Based on 1.7MW installed they are getting 22% usage now given that the sun is down for 50% of the time thats 45% of Max which seems reasonable but I don't know what a good collector would expect.

The most important information that I wanted from this article that is missing is the forking area of the installation. It looks a decent size but I cant really tell if its 1000m2 or 10,000m2 (0.25 - 2.5 acres). They say that floating it keeps it cool which improves efficiency - a typical house installation is about 10m2 but I doubt that provides the equivalent of a homes annual requirement so at 10,000m2 they'd be ahead of the current game. But it does show the scale needed.

The report talks about using reservoirs for installation and apart from the western US where the reservoirs are disappearing this seems a good idea. There is already access at the dam for engineering input maintenance etc and often hydro and they cover a huge area.

The first problem is going to be keeping it clean / stopping birds and other animals nesting on it etc Also if the panels get submerged do they still perform / work when they dry out or do you have to keep them dry.

Obviously we still need coal / nuclear but if they would just give us the useful information we might concede that there is some benefit in these sort of units particularly in remote locations

... baaad kitty

naah just lazy kitty but that's kind of a tautology isn't it! (although judging by your website bowyering you are more Del the busy beaver)

Just some more thoughts though. What is the impact on wildlife in the shadow of the solar array. This is going to intercept all the solar radiation so I assume that means that nothing will grow in its shadow so that's going to bugger the weeds and then all the fish life.

On European rivers / reservoirs there isnt much to worry about - the biggest thing in the rivers is likely an otter or a pike which arent going to do much unless you put it in shallow water and let domestic cattle wander across, but what would a hippo do to it in Africa or if you go for sea bourne systems - whales, dolphins seals etc

Everytime humans act over large areas, something goes wrong. It will always change microclimate and biodiversity. I'd rather have many small systems installed, maybe one in each house or building.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that currently we have no idea how big these things need to be. If it needs 100m2 for one dwelling then most of us are buggered. Where I live in Korea most of the accommodation is in high rise apartments so I might claim maybe 1m2 of the roof space, but the Han river is very wide and is not used for much in the way of commercial exploitation so might offer an option although quite limited in the overall scope of Seoul's power requirements. If it were 10m2 I might have managed with my place back in London but as I said not here in Seoul.

That is the most frustrating part of the article that there is no sense of scope of area and power density.