Yemisi Izuora
The equatorial West Africa near Nigeria has been identified as having the greatest potential for offshore floating solar arrays.
By mid-century, the global economy is expected to be largely decarbonized and electrified, with extensive use of solar and wind energy.
While solar panels can be placed on rooftops, in arid areas, and even floated on water bodies, countries with high population densities like Nigeria and Indonesia have limited space for solar energy harvesting.
These regions, however, can take advantage of the calm equatorial seas and harvest effectively unlimited energy from floating solar panels.
Floating solar panels can also be placed on inland lakes and reservoirs, which has significant potential and is already growing rapidly.
Regions that experience waves no larger than 6 meters and winds no stronger than 15 meters per second have the capacity to generate up to one million terawatt-hours
TWh per year.
Indonesia, in particular, has vast solar and pumped hydro potential.
By fully decarbonizing the economy with solar power, approximately 25,000 square kilometers of solar panels would be needed to support an affluent Indonesia. Fortunately, Indonesia has about 140,000 square kilometers of calm inland seas, which is 200 times larger than what is required to meet the country’s future energy needs.
While the offshore floating solar industry is still in its infancy, the most suitable regions for these panels tend to cluster within 5–12 degrees of latitude of the Equator, primarily in Indonesia and the Gulf of Guinea near Nigeria.
These regions have low wind potential, high population density, rapid growth in both population and energy consumption, and intact ecosystems that should be protected.
Despite challenges such as salt corrosion, marine fouling, and potential damage to the marine environment, offshore floating solar panels are expected to play a significant role in the energy mix for countries with access to calm equatorial seas.
By mid-century, approximately one billion people in these countries could rely mainly on solar energy, leading to the fastest energy transition in history.
Vast arrays of solar panels floating on calm seas near the Equator have the potential to generate effectively unlimited solar energy for densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa.
According to new research, offshore solar panels in Indonesia alone could produce about 35,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy per year, which is similar to global electricity production.