Floating solar has been around for the better part of two decades, and almost all of it sits on water that behaves itself. Reservoirs, irrigation ponds, flooded quarries, the occasional Bavarian lake. Fresh water, barely a ripple, and usually a shoreline close enough to run a cable to.<\/p>\n
The ocean is a different animal. Salt eats everything, the swell never stops, and anything you moor out there has to survive the one bad storm a year that nobody put in the brochure.<\/p>\n
So the interesting part of the news out of Valencia isn’t the megawatt. It’s where they put it.<\/p>\n
A Spanish startup called BlueNewables, with backing from the utility Naturgy, has parked two 500-kilowatt solar platforms on the seaward side of the Port of Valencia’s southern breakwater. The Port Authority announced on October 1<\/a> that the second one was in place and the whole 1-megawatt setup had moved into its testing phase.<\/p>\n Both platforms were built at a shipyard in Vigo, on the opposite corner of Spain, and towed around the Iberian Peninsula to get there. Which is a long way to drag a solar farm, but you’ll see why in a minute.<\/p>\n Spanish port officials call it “offshore” solar. I’d call it “just past the rocks” solar, but it’s still salt water, it still moves, and that’s the whole point of the exercise.<\/p>\n Each platform is a steel catamaran with a deck about 210 feet long and 135 feet wide, which works out to a little over 28,000 square feet of surface per unit. The deck carries 600 solar panels, so 1,200 across the pair, and a technical area with the inverters and transformers that turn what the panels make into something the port’s grid can take. Reporting from the Vigo shipyard put the weight of the second platform at a bit over 220 tons, and the two are built to the same design.<\/p>\n The catamaran shape isn’t a styling choice. Two hulls hold the deck up above the waterline, so the panels sit clear of the waves instead of bobbing in them, and a maintenance crew can walk around on a flat surface rather than a raft.<\/p>\n BlueNewables also says the platform uses the seawater underneath as a natural coolant, which, if it holds up in practice, is pretty handy. The panels on your roof lose efficiency as they get hot, and the Mediterranean in August is hot.<\/p>\n The panels themselves are bifacial. If you haven’t run into the term, it means they have cells on both faces, so the back of the panel picks up light bouncing off whatever is underneath it.<\/p>\n On a roof that’s not much. On open water it’s a lot of glare, and the company is counting on that reflected light to bump the output.<\/p>\n The two units are named Paiporta and Catarroja, after two towns outside Valencia that were hit hard by the floods that tore through the region two years ago this month. Paiporta went into the water at the San Enrique shipyard on May 18, according to BlueNewables<\/a>, and the Port Authority logged its arrival in Valencia on July 13.<\/p>\n Catarroja followed in early August, with the shipyard using two cranes and a rising tide at the same time to walk it off the slipway, and the yard formally handed it over on September 4. Getting a 220-ton object from a slipway into the water without a drydock apparently takes about 15 people and some patience, and you don’t get a second try at it.<\/p>\n Fair question. Valencia is one of the busiest container ports in Europe, and every square foot of quay is already doing something that pays better than a solar panel, as you’d expect. The port already gets north of 20 percent of its electricity from renewables and has gone as far as bolting panels to the side of one of its buildings, but a working harbor doesn’t have a spare field lying around, and the land behind it is city.<\/p>\n So BlueNewables’ pitch is basically that the water next to a port is a surface nobody’s fighting over. Same logic for islands, and for any coastline where the grid is weak and the land is spoken for. The company’s own description talks about places where land is scarce or expensive, grids are thin, or the power system is an island one, and a Spanish port with a city on one side and the sea on the other checks most of those boxes.<\/p>\n We’ve seen this “put it somewhere weird” approach work before. A German operator stood 2,600 panels upright on a Bavarian lake<\/a> because a law capped how much water they could shade, and a town utility hung 64 of them on a public pool fence<\/a> facing the parking lot.<\/p>\n Valencia is the same idea with a lot more salt and a lot more steel. Everyone involved is careful to call it a pre-commercial demonstrator, and you should read it that way too.<\/p>\n The money comes through a program called RENMARINAS VALENCIAPORT, funded by Spain’s energy agency IDAE with European NextGenerationEU recovery cash. The Port Authority built the test area and the grid connection, and says that infrastructure will stay put for whatever marine energy demonstrator comes next. BlueNewables brought the platforms.<\/p>\n Naturgy, through its innovation arm, is in for two years of shared data: how much the thing produces, what breaks, what maintenance costs, and what the port learns about plugging a floating generator into a harbor grid. That’s where the actual value of the project is, and you can’t see any of it from the beach.<\/p>\nSo what exactly is floating out there?<\/h2>\n
Why not put the panels on the dock instead?<\/h2>\n
This is a test, not a power plant yet<\/h2>\n