Publications
Partners
- The City of Cape Town launched its first floating solar pilot project at the Kraaifontein wastewater treatment works last week.
- The panels were installed on a body of water and the project aims to quantify the evaporation savings and the relative energy generated.
- This pilot is part of the City's climate change strategy to convert all its facilities to carbon neutral by 2030.
There's something in the water at the Kraaifontein wastewater treatment centre in Cape Town - as of last week, it's become home to a newly launched floating solar pilot project.
The City of Cape Town and its partners installed two solar rigs at the site - one fixed to the ground, the other floating on water.
Over the next 12 months, this research study will capture and measure data from both these installations and compare the relative energy generation between the floating solar and ground-mounted rigs.
It will also measure the efficiency of the panels in preventing water evaporation.
The study was established by the City and its partners Floating Solar, the Water Research Commission and the University of Cape Town.
READ HERE | 'The tip of the iceberg': Expert environmentalist details youth's harrowing future, urges parental action
Rob Smallie, head of business development and project management at Floating Solar, said the primary objective of this pilot project was to quantify the evaporation savings of a floating solar system:
Smallie believed farmers could greatly benefit from floating solar technology as it addressed three key issues: Electricity, water evaporation and using space otherwise not utilised.
"The chats we've had with a lot of the farmers, they all mirror the same message, and that is that they are losing two and a half meters of water a year to evaporation," he told News24.
In dense agricultural areas, farmers did not have space for ground-mount solar to produce sufficient energy, Smallie added.
"So looking at an irrigation dam, you've got plenty of space, unused space, that can be utilised for floating solar," he said.
Leila Mahomed-Weideman, director of Sustainable Energy Markets for the City of Cape Town, said floating solar ultimately "kills two birds with one stone":
Mahomed-Weideman said this project was part of a bigger objective to convert all the City's facilities to carbon neutral by 2030 and to diversify and innovate around its energy supply.
"This floating solar system is feeding the pump station over there that pumps the water, so we are using renewable energy to pump the systems. And that is what we are hoping to do; not only on the buildings that we own, but within the facilities like wastewater treatment works," she said.
ALSO READ | uMzinyathi Municipality’s rural villages battling to get clean water
The data collected from this pilot would potentially inform the design of larger utility scaling floating solar projects over the next few years through competitive bid processes, the City said in a press release.
"Obviously we want to do what is most efficient within the City," said Mahomed-Weideman.
Did you know you can listen to articles? Subscribe to News24 for access to this exciting feature and more.
