Solar Panels on Land and Water

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Published at - February 27, 2022

5 min read

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Bhadla Solar Park is one of the largest solar power farms with a capacity of around 2.25GW over an area of fourteen thousand acres. It is situated in the hot dusty Bhadla village of Jodhpur district, Rajasthan, India. You may call it a solar park, solar farm, or just simply a solar power station. Overall, it is a photovoltaic power system producing electricity from sunlight. Solar farms are solar panels in great numbers that operate like any other solar power plant. On the other hand, like any other farm, it is also a large-scale project. The electricity generated can either be sold individually to clients or added to the power grid, either way, companies can gain great profit through green energy. We cannot emphasize enough how important it is for people to finally focus on global warming. A solar farm produces no greenhouse gasses and uses a renewable energy source, sunlight. This is the perfect replacement of fossil fuel to produce electricity. Countries around the world are competing to build the most effective and the highest power output solar power farms. This leads us to today’s topic where we will tell you the types of solar farms existing and also know some information about them.

Spare for Solar Farms

Huanghe

Solar power stations occupy a huge open area. The giant structure of the panels and the massive machines such as inverters take up space. Along with this, human interference for maintenance work also requires some room. In the end, each panel requires a good enough free volume of space. For instance, Huanghe Hydropower Golmud Solar Park covers around 640 acres. This solar power farm is also considered to be one of the largest in the world. It is situated in China over a desert to have enough area for 80 solar power plants. Golmud Solar Park produces almost 2.8GW and the cost to build this project was RMB 3.26 billion which is equivalent to $520.77 million. The power plant has been built with utmost efficiency. To this day, the experts are working on increasing the power output. It follows that most of the farms are on water bodies or on unusable land to have more supply of electrical power.

Solar Farm on Land and Water

Noor

We have already seen how solar parks are large-scale projects either by cost or by the excessive area taken up. The ultimate goal is to make a profit from these farms. Solar farms are becoming more popular as this is also seen as economically profitable. As of now, the largest solar power plant is said to be Noor Solar Park situated in Morocco with a power output of 1117 MW. Such a project took up to $9 billion. Another example of a floating solar power plant would be the Sirindhorn reservoir. The solar panels here are afloat so any sunlight reaching the waterbody is directly converted to electricity. This power station spreads to around 660km with unbelievably 145000 panels. It can be said that the engineers had the most interest in making this power station effective. It has been built so cleverly that during the daytime, the power station converts light to electricity and at night the water turbines rotate to supply power. This smart use of space allows the farm to be active 24 hours with no wastage of time. Floating Solar power stations are good ways to avoid land consumption. Given that the global population is increasing each year, we should also consider the consumption of both land and energy to be important as well. At the same time, the layer of water helps the panels to cool down so that less energy is lost to heat. However, the maintenance work and the construction of panels on water bodies are much more difficult than on land. Both land and water have their own perks and cons yet so far they are the only solutions we have.

All in all, we can now see how solar power farms can harvest sunlight and produce electricity. This is a big-scale business project that is environmentally friendly with zero production of greenhouse gasses. The desert land and enormous water bodies are all being hit by the light particles that can generate huge amounts of electrical energy. Countries are now competing against each other to have the highest power supply from green energy. Here, solar power is the new focus besides wind and water turbines. Solar farms are quite different from commercial and individual solar power panels. They are planned in a way to produce electrical power to add to the power grid so that there is less pressure on fossil fuel extraction. As technology around solar panels develops further, these farms will be built with greater efficiency with maximum efficiency.