The creation of this groundbreaking solar plant traces its roots to the Fukushima disaster back in 2011 when a tsunami hit the island of Honshu in Japan. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake, which struck while multiple reactors were having their power cores switched out. The old cores required cooling. When the earthquake was detected, the remaining active reactors had to have their control rods inserted, meaning that they could not power their own cooling pumps. Diesel generators were started to provide power for the coolant systems. Many of these failed when the first wave of the tsunami hit, but the remaining were sufficient to power all of the pumps. The largest of the waves was able to rise over the sea wall and flood the generators, shutting them down. This lead to the total meltdown of the plant.
Since this disaster the nuclear grid in Japan hasn’t been able to get going again. Prior to Fukushima, nuclear energy provided over 30% of Japan’s power, but since then only three reactors have been restarted and the majority of Japanese citizens do not support nuclear power use. This has left the grid shorthanded, with fossil fuels picking up the slack. Japan even resorts to importing energy from their neighbours when their grid falls short, which is an incredibly expensive endeavour. Environmentalists have pushed for more and more renewable energy sources so that governments don’t have to choose between the dangers of nuclear energy and the main sources of climate change.
The Japanese electronics company Kyocera secured the contract to build the world’s largest floating solar plant. This is the fourth project of its kind that Kyocera has worked on, and by far the largest. The plant itself will cover an area of around 180,000 square meters, which is about the size of eighteen regulation soccer fields. Kyocera and their French solar partners Ciel et Terre have been working on floating solar technology since about 2006, and have made significant progress. The cells, of which there will be other 50 thousand, are metal free, recyclable, and resistant to both corrosion and the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
Japan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and usable land is an extremely desirable resource. Building a plant of this scale on land would be far more expensive than it would be worth. However, Japan does possess abundant water sources which are necessary for both flood control and agricultural purposes. The surface selected for the project is the Yakamura Dam reservoir, about 70 km south-east of Tokyo, and the plant will be anchored down to the bottom of the reservoir itself. The top surface is mostly flat and has been designed to be resistant to everything that Japan’s weather can throw at it, including typhoons.
Construction of the plant began back in 2014 and is not expected to conclude until the first quarter of 2018. Most of the work is prefabricating the enormous amount of solar cells, but installation and assembly on the scale required is still a daunting task. Once the plant is finished it will provide about 13.7 megawatts of power, which is approximately 8.5% of the energy required by Japan. For those of us that don’t just know how much 13.7 megawatts of power is, it will either power close to 5,000 homes or 120,000 individual Playstation 4 systems.
Although the Yakamura Solar plant is a definite step in the right direction on the renewable energy department, it will not be anywhere close to the size of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility. Partly owned by Google, ISPF is the world’s largest solar power plant with an approximate area of 14 square kilometers. The Goliath of solar energy is located in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, less that 70 km away from Las Vegas. ISPF was commissioned back in early 2014, but has had trouble producing its expected levels of power. By November 2014 it was producing approximately half of its expected output, and the California Energy Commission blamed this discrepancy on “clouds, jet contrails and weather”. By 2015 however the plant was producing 170 percent more power when compared to the previous year.
This displays the temperamental nature of renewable energy in general. The Mojave Desert gets pure sun all day, nearly every day of the year. In a region like Japan with more fluctuating weather conditions than Nevada, can solar energy be a reliable source of power? Kyocera Electronics seem to think so, since they have plans for four more plants past the Yakamura Reservoir plant. Japan also has plans in place to build a large wind farm off the coast of Fukushima.
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