New Jersey is host to an 8.9 megawatt (MW) floating solar farm – the largest floating solar array in North America.
NJR Clean Energy Ventures owns and operates the floating solar farm, which covers 17 acres of the Canoe Brook reservoir in Short Hills, New Jersey. NJR CEV and New Jersey American Water held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the project yesterday.
The floating solar farm consists of 16,510 solar panels, and the clean power they generate is enough to power 1,400 homes annually. It will provide around 95% of the power needs for New Jersey American Water’s Canoe Brook Water Treatment Plant.
Floating solar consists of PV panels attached to rafts. The water keeps the solar panels cool, thus increasing efficiency, and the panels also reduce evaporation to nearly zero.
Robert Pohlman, vice president of NJR Clean Energy Ventures, said, “Floating solar technology creates new opportunities for underutilized bodies of water, allowing space that would otherwise sit vacant to enable large-scale renewable energy generation, which helps to bring the benefits of clean energy to even more customers.”
Top comment by ADubya
Floating solar is a great symbiotic technology to hydro power and agricultural water reservoirs. Great first application. Reducing evaporation from reservoirs may become an important side benefit as more river systems are drought affected, for example in California and the Southwest.
Read more: New Jersey will now require all-electric car sales by 2035
Photo: Business Wire
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