India's Largest Offshore Floating Photovoltaic Project Commissioned!

On 25 June, India's largest floating offshore photovoltaic project was commissioned.

Developed by Tata Power Solar Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Power India, the 101.6MW project is the largest of its kind in India to date.

The project was installed within the required deadline, despite daunting challenges during construction such as changing water depths, high tides and severe water salinity issues. The floating system was primarily designed and supplied by Ciel & Terre.

The project involved the entire array of floats and photovoltaic module modules having to be towed 3 kilometres down a national waterway connected to the sea at a depth of 15 metres, exposing the PV modules to strong winds and rough tides with waves of up to 3.5 metres.

Speaking about this remarkable feat, Dr Praveer Sinha, CEO and Managing Director of Tata Power, said: "The commissioning of India's first and largest floating solar project is an innovative and progressive step towards achieving India's sustainable energy goals. We are immensely proud of the tireless efforts of our team in delivering this unique solar project floating on a large body of water."

Tata Power has signed a power purchase agreement with the PSU customer in which all the power generated by the plant will be used by the Kerela State Electricity Board (KSEB). Interestingly, all solar modules used at the plant are safely transported, unloaded and stored by Tata Power Solar on a limited piece of land for approximately 35 days. During the construction phase, the plant was also staffed by a team of 350 people whose task was to speed up the project in accordance with the contractual agreement.

The project has high quality and technical requirements for floating systems. This is another example of Ciel&Terre's commercialisation of a large capacity offshore floating PV project, following the 88MW offshore floating PV project in Taiwan.

As a leader in floating PV, Ciel&Terre is one of the world's most experienced floating PV suppliers and has worked on many different types of floating PV projects. Recently, Ciel&Terre has continued to innovate, taking into account the trends in PV module sizes and the changing needs of customers, and has launched a new generation of AquaGrid products.

The new product range continues the stability of the older generation, but is more flexible and adaptable to a wide range of module sizes and environmental conditions. It is already being used in a wide range of floating PV projects around the world, with over 400MW of the new products in use.

In fact, offshore PV has become a generally accepted form of application worldwide, previously, the Ministry of Natural Resources National Marine Technology Centre Marine Energy Development Centre deputy director Cui Lin introduced to, "global offshore PV potential capacity of about 4,000GW, China's long coastline, theoretical offshore PV can be installed more than 70GW. in the specific use of the form can be divided into pile-based and floating type. Both can be combined with aquaculture."

However, compared to inland water conditions than, facing the marine environmental risks, such as smog and high humidity, sea wind and waves, adverse weather conditions and marine disasters, these environmental risks then bring technical, economic and other multi-faceted challenges. These environmental risks pose a number of technical and economic challenges, and there are very few offshore photovoltaic projects in China that are actually licensed, and they face problems such as few cases of sea use, insufficient practical experience, inadequate supporting policies and lack of specific planning.