Following the March 2010 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster, all nuclear power stations in Japan promptly shut down. To date, only one has come back online since the 2010 incident that resulted in the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents due to fear of radiation.
In the previous years, Japan relied on costly imported energy while waiting for safety checks to be completed. There's no assurance that all of the nuclear plants will resume operations.
This pushed local firms to build solutions for renewable energy to handle Japan's future energy requirements. One of the firms pushing for new energy sources include Kyocera Corporation, which is set to build the world's biggest solar farm by 2018.
Since most of Japan's land area is highly populated or rocky, Kyocera is targeting "unused" areas such as reservoirs. The company tagged team with Century Tokyo Leasing Corporation to build its current grand project, the biggest floating solar farm in the world in terms of produced energy.
Kyocera currently has a floating solar farm. But the new project will overshadow the current floating farm by using five times more solar panels. The new project will also extend the covered area by seven times. Kyocera chose a site located 50 miles from Tokyo and scheduled to launch by 2018.
"The project will generate an estimated 16,170 megawatt hours (MWh) per year, enough electricity to power approximately 4,970 typical households," said Kyocera on the company website. The company noted that the produced electricity is equivalent to the consumption of 19,000 barrels of oil.
Placing the solar panels above waters will not only give life to idle or abandoned spaces. Experts believed that the water's cooling effect can improve the solar panel's efficiency by 10 percent compared to placing it on land.
Placing the solar farms on top of waters also help lower evaporation levels during the hot summer months. This boosts the project's green credentials even higher.
Solar adviser Ray Noble from the Renewable Energy Association in the United Kingdom said building floating farms should only be done if there is an issue of land scarcity. He commented that in the UK, where there are plenty of industrialized areas, building solar farms on land is less expensive than placing them on water.
