Technical Energy Potential Of Floating PV Power Plants (FPV)

Energy demand is significantly expanding worldwide nowadays, as a result the capacity of the electricity generating units come into question. Based on the World Energy Balances Highlights (2020 edition) [19], it was found that the world electricity generation is about 26, 618, 881 GW h from all sources proposed i.e. "Fossil fuels, Nuclear, Renewable Energies". Consequently, there would be too much negative effects on the environment due to the continuous usage of fossil contents which are used later for the electricity generation. The electric sector obsessed about 42 % of the energy demand in 2015 and it is expected to raise to 47 % in the next 20 years. It is remarkable that the non-renewable sources of energy affect the environment negatively and increase the global warming when they are used for the generation of the electricity.
Despite the constantly increasing of the electricity demand, the dependency of the non-
renewable sources on energy must be reduced in order to lower the amount of the greenhouse gases. In 2018, the renewable energy generation share has became 13.5 % of the total world energy supply including (Solar PV, Solar thermal, Wind, Bio-fuels, Hydro, and Geothermal energies) [19]. The solar photovoltaic power generation has increased by about 22 % in 2019, and namely to 720 T W h. It can be considered by this increase as 3 % of the total world electricity generation share. In the meanwhile, the main challenge of installing normal ground-mounted PV power plants is the space. Large surface areas must be available in order to benefit well from such power plants. In order to tackle this issue, another generation of PV power plants came into question which is; Floating Photovoltaic (FPV). This technology depends on installing the PV modules over the surface of water, in order to profit not only from the extra space where water body is located, but also from the cooling effect, which improves the performance of PV modules and particularly, the performance ratio as well as the electrical efficiency. Furthermore, a tracking model can be easily applied to this kind of PV, since the surface of water offers a smooth medium for changing the modules orientation over the whole day. The floating photovoltaics have a lot of benefits over the ground-mounted type, for example; the land occupancy, as they do not require a land space, since they are installed and erected on the surface of water, except only the needed spaces which are demanded by the electrical equipment, switch gears. Although, FPV plants are considered relatively more expensive than the land-based photovoltaic power plants, but they empower the possibility to avoid competing
with the agriculture and green zones. Moreover, to prevent the competing with the agriculture
and green lands, some countries encourage the investors to install PV on the water bodies by increasing the rate of incentives. For instance, Japan has boosted the Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) for the floating photovoltaic over the FIT of the ground-mounted PV. In particular, the floating PV array in Sanuki, Kagawa prefecture, which has an installed capacity of 1.5 MW and expected to meet the consumption of more than 500 local households, will purchase the electricity at a Feed-In-Tariff of JPY 32 per kWh (0.26 e/kW h)[20].
In this work, two main models are built in order to calculate the PV module temperature
and the surface temperature of the ground and water in order to; 1) determine the how the
surface temperature of the ground and water affects the module temperature and namely the
output power, 2) predict the temperature of both FPV, 3) calculate the to the instantaneous
efficiency and power of the FPV and GPV modules, and 4) predict the annual yield of floating PV module.