Assessment of floating solar photovoltaics potential in existing hydropower reservoirs in Africa

Affordable clean energy transition in developing countries: Pathways and technologies

“…Hence, energy sources in this category should be used to form the supplement for seasonal periods of higher load demand (and should only be a fraction of baseload capacity). Nonetheless, synergistic benefits can be derived from co-locating renewable sources; e.g., installing floating PV panels on hydropower reservoirs has the potential to reduce evaporation and increase generated electricity (by 2-fold for 1% floating PV coverage of African hydro-reservoirs) ( Gonzalez Sanchez et al., 2021 ).…”

Benefits and Critical Knowledge Gaps in Determining the Role of Floating Photovoltaics in the Energy-Water-Food Nexus

“…Supporting data were not available, and correspondence with Far Niente indicates no ability to measure evaporation reduction [69,80]; however, this installation covers most of the available water body surface area, suggesting that the evaporation calculations are partly based on water body area coverage. Sanchez et al [50] use a geospatial estimation of the water loss caused by evaporation in Africa's existing hydropower reservoirs [15] to estimate additional potential hydroelectricity generation as a result of the water savings from covering the reservoirs with FPV. A similar approach was applied to quantify the evaporation savings of an FPV prototype in Alicante, Spain.…”

“…Hybridizing FPV systems with hydropower dams could unlock additional co-benefits, including decreased infrastructure installation costs by leveraging the existing transmission infrastructure, reduced curtailment and improved power quality of PV, decreased dependence on basin water for power generation especially during droughts and other water scarcity periods, and reduced erosion from the diminished wave action in reservoirs [31,34,[44][45][46][47][48][49]. Sanchez et al [50] estimate that siting FPV systems on 1% of the existing hydropower reservoirs in Africa could generate approximately 53 TWh of electricity (largely from FPV plants located in West and East Africa, which have abundant hydropower and solar resources). Lee et al [49] estimate that the global technical potential for FPV-hydropower hybrids ranges from 4251 to 10,616 TWh (which could meet 29-72% of additional power generation needs by 2040).…”

Methodological Proposal for the Assessment Potential of Pumped Hydropower Energy Storage: Case of Gran Canaria Island

“…The assumption has been made only to use dams as reservoirs, because the dams which have been constructed are hermetic, facilitate faster project implementation and are often unused in energetic and hydraulic terms. In addition, the use of these dams as part of a hydroelectric power plant would imply an adaptation and filling of those dams that are not in operating conditions and so could be used for other complementary uses, such as the implementation of solar photovoltaic plants on the surface [31,32] or irrigation for farmers in the areas located below the connected dams. Table 1.…”