Floating Solar - Global Opportunity

25/03/2021

Find out more about the huge potential of Floating Solar and the major opportunities it offers for the project finance community: an article written by our Energy experts Allan Baker and Cedric Chatel in Project Finance International, March 10 2021.

Wind forward to the end of 2019, and the record for the world’s largest floating array was taken by the CGN Dangtu floating solar project in China with a capacity of 260MW, and this is likely to be eclipsed by one of the many utility-scale projects currently being developed around the world, including the massive 2.1GW Saemangeum project being proposed for the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea in South Korea.

Unless you have been following this segment of the market you could be forgiven for being taken by surprise at the speed with which these large-scale projects have emerged, but in fact floating solar has been around since 2007 when the first demonstration project was installed at Aichi in Japan. The first commercial project followed in 2008 in California with the installation of a 175kW system on reservoir, a pragmatic way to avoid taking up land that could otherwise be used for growing grapes. The huge potential of floating solar is now widely recognised around the world, and offers a major opportunity for the project finance community, as we outline in this article.

Click here to read the full article 

 

Article written by Allan Baker, Global Head of Advisory and Project Finance for the Energy Group, and Cedric Chatel, Managing Director, Energy Finance & Advisory, Societe Generale.

Source: Project Finance International, March 10 2021