Study Of Potential Capacity For Floating Solar In Malaysia

• Main Author: Liew, Pei Mei
• Format: Final Year Project / Dissertation / Thesis
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utar.edu.my/4055/1/3E_1603589_FYP_report_%2D_PEI_MEI_LIEW.pdf; http://eprints.utar.edu.my/4055/

Lack of land space and escalating land price are the main disadvantages of largescale ground-mounted solar farms. Deforestation is also often carried out to provide space for large-scale ground-mounted plants. Hence, a floating solar system might be a solution on top of these issues by installing solar panels on the water bodies. Since there are around 60 lakes in Selangor, they can be utilised to install floating solar plants. This project aims to study the potential capacity of floating solar in Malaysia. Selangor state is chosen as the sample location because it has the highest number of lakes. The lake images are retrieved from Google Cloud Platform through Uniform Resource Locator encoding by stating the lakes’ earth coordinates, zoom level and image size. By using image processing techniques on the lake images in Python, the number of solar panels that can be installed on each lake is calculated through determining the lakes’ length and width. The lake area, photovoltaic (PV) capacity, first-year electricity yield and lake utilisation rate are calculated for individual lakes. The total PV capacity installed on the Selangor lakes is then calculated, which is 1794 MW, and the total existing PV capacity in the whole Malaysia was 996 MW in 2020. Hence, installing of solar panels on lakes in Selangor allows the solar capacity to increase by 2.8 times compared to the year 2020. In short, the positive results in this project show that floating solar is another good option to be adopted for the achievement of 20 per cent of renewables in electricity generation by 2030.