Dutch water management agency Rijkswaterstaat, which is part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, and Port of Rotterdam Authority announced the start of works for a pilot floating PV project.
The PV power generator, which is being installed at De Slufter, a depot for contaminated dredging spoil on the western edge of Rotterdam’s port area, will be tested to study the possibility of installing a large-scale floating solar farm at the site, the authority said. In addition, the project will examine which conditions such projects need to satisfy to obtain a permit from the responsible water authority.
Rijkswaterstaat announced in March it intended to make water surfaces and other land under its control available for the installation of PV and other renewable energy power plants.
Furthermore, the agency said it intends to use the surface of the IJsselmeer, a shallow artificial lake of 1100 km² in the central Netherlands bordering the province of Flevoland. Rijkswaterstaat stressed that Floating PV projects will also be part of the plan, which was dubbed PetaPlan.
According to a report released by Credence Research in March, the floating solar panels market was valued at US$1.50 Bn in 2016, and is expected to reach US$ 1.58 Bn by 2022, expanding at a CAGR of 113.9% from 2016 to 2022.
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The Slufter project of Rijkswaterstaat is still in its second pilot stage, with 4 different contributors with a total of only 200 kWp floating solar. The first “larger” realized floating solar plant has been an installation on a sewer treatment plant pond at Everstekoog, Texel (island north of North Holland, November 2016). It’s capacity (app. 240 kWp) has now been firmly surpassed by another floating solar project in the north of the same isle Texel, on a rainwater buffer basin at a recreation park site. It has almost 2400 solar modules (possibly almost 800 kWp), and has been officially inaugurated on September 8 this year.
Under the SDE subsidy scheme(s), a total of almost 300 megawatts of floating solar power has been allocated sofar for 20 sites (most of them on deep ponds on former sand-winning sites), so we’ll see more – and increasingly bigger – “FSP’s” in Netherlands in coming years.
A floating solar park with a capacity of 1850 kWp is up en running since June 2018 on a rainwater basin in a agriculture park in de community of Lingewaard. See Google Earth 51 55′ 34.39″ N 5 54′ 08.77″ E .Due to the good result in 2018 an extension with another 300kWp will follow soon.