A “solar island” in the middle of a swamp: how Portugal is taking the lead in floating solar energy

The world wants to be less dependent on fossil fuels. The War in Ukraine has promoted projects based on renewable energy, and one of the trends that has become fashionable is that of floating solar parks. These “solar islands” are gradually being implanted all over the world and now Portugal gets ready to install the largest in Europe.

An island in the middle of a reservoir. The location of this unique structure will be the Alqueva reservoir —the largest in all of Western Europe—, in Portugal. That’s where two tugboats have brought a huge array of 12,000 solar panels that would take up about four football fields.

Necessity sharpens wit. Portugal barely used Russian hydrocarbons, but gas-based plants have been affected by rising prices. This has led the Portuguese government to promote new projects such as this one by Energias de Portugal (EDP).

promising savings. The floating solar park has a production capacity of 5 megawatts, but the most important thing is the cost of that production: the implementation of this “power plant” costs a third of what a gas-based plant would cost.

The panels of this dam, which allows the operation of a hydroelectric plant, will produce 7.5 GWh per year, and next to them there will be a series of lithium batteries that will allow 2 GWh to be stored. The project will satisfy the supply of 1,500 families in the nearby towns of Moura and Portel.

Floating parks have advantages. Among them, an important one: they do not occupy land surface, and their installation in these reservoirs is particularly cost efficient since the infrastructures of hydroelectric plants can be used to “connect” that solar supply to said networks.

This promising project is, it seems, the beginning of an important effort to go further in this type of floating solar parks. There are already gigantic installations like the Saemangeum project in South Korea, with an impressive 1,200 MW of capacity. EDP ​​will soon go further with a second project that will have an installed capacity of 70 MW, still a long way from the South Korean giant, but which will undoubtedly continue to help this effort to take advantage of renewable energies.