Floating solar power is increasingly popular thanks to its outstanding benefits, especially in countries with scarce land, or having the advantages of sea, rivers and lakes.
Experts say that Vietnam has a lot of potential in developing floating solar power because of its long coastline, many rivers, lakes, and systems of hydroelectric reservoirs in operation. Floating solar is growing in popularity because of a number of outstanding benefits, especially in countries with little land but large water surface areas like Singapore.
Singapore, an island nation with a land area of just 728 square kilometers, has just opened the 60MWp Sembcorp Tengeh floating solar farm on Lake Tengeh, one of the country’s 17 reservoirs. Singapore also plans to complete the floating solar farms at the Bedok and Lower Seletar reservoirs by the end of 2021. The 60MWp floating solar farm at the Tengeh reservoir uses 122,000 modules of Trina Solar Vertex. Each module, of the same model DEG18MC.20 (II), has an output power up to 505W. This is a very suitable model to be applied in Vietnam.
Floating solar farms sometimes have lower investment costs because they cost less for land leasing as well as for things like clearing vegetation, building trenches or piling. With enhanced performance monitoring, operating and maintenance (O&M) costs can reach the same level as on-shore solar power projects.
Different from a ground-based solar power project where solar modules often operate inefficiently in high temperature conditions, a floating solar power project with solar modules mounted on water surface can work better thanks to the cooling steam.
In Vietnam, Dam Tra O floating solar farm located in My Loi commune, Phu My district, Binh Dinh province, is applying this model with the Vertex modules of Trina Solar DEG18MC.20 (II) model. The solar farm has an installed capacity of 50.6MWp with an average annual power output of about 78 million kWh.
Source: cafef.vn
