Marine floating solar plants: an overview of potential, challenges and feasibility

The offshore environment represents a vast source of renewable energy, and marine renewable energy plants have the potential to contribute to the future energy mix significantly. Floating solar technology emerged nearly a decade ago, driven mainly by the lack of available land, loss of efficiency at high operating cell temperature, energy security and decarbonisation targets. The vast majority of the available technology and projects in operation are located in inland freshwater bodies. Currently there is momentum in the sector to develop floating solar systems to be deployed in marine environments. Experience from inland floating solar projects could open up possibilities to scale up and move to nearshore or even offshore conditions. Hence, it is relevant to explore the technical feasibility and challenges of designing floating photovoltaics (FPV) in marine environments, with a natural transition of FPV applications first to nearshore locations and then further exposed offshore environments. This research study provides a literature review of the potential of marine applications of floating solar plants, exploring the current available technologies, the technical challenges and the risks in designing and building these projects in the marine environment.