Floating Solar

Floating solar, also called floating photovoltaics or floatovoltaics, consists of solar panels mounted on a structure that floats, typically anchored by plastic buoys and cables on a reservoir, quarry lake or irrigation canal rather than built on land. Because the panels sit over water, they run cooler than land mounted panels, which raises their output by roughly 5 to 15 percent, and in arid regions they can cut evaporation from the water body below by around 30 percent, all while leaving the land itself free for other use. Global floating solar capacity grew from about 3 gigawatts in 2020 to about 13 gigawatts in 2022, and the World Bank estimates that covering just 10 percent of the surface of the largest water bodies worldwide with floating solar could yield more than 4,000 gigawatts of technical potential; the largest installation as of 2025 is the 1,000 megawatt Dongying HG14 project in China.