The world’s largest floating solar power plant is fully operational

The waters of the reservoir in Dezhou, a Chinese prefecture-level city in Shandong province, are not filled with boats but with photovoltaic panels. This is the largest floating solar power plant ever built in the world, and it has just started operating at full capacity. The news was announced by Huaneng International, the Chinese electricity company that invested in the project and took part in its implementation. The plant, however, was built and installed by Sungrow Powera world leader in the production of photovoltaic panels. This work started in early November 2020 and continued in throughout the pandemic at an excellent pace. The new floating solar power plant, which today has an installed capacity of 320 MW at full capacity, was built in two phases. The first 200 MW were connected to the grid in 2020, and the remaining 120 MW at the end of December 2021, making it a record-breaker for this type of project. The plant floats on the waters of the reservoir of the nearby Huaneng Power plant, thus allowing an area that had become unproductive to be reclaimed. The company estimates that the modules will produce around 221 million kilowatt hours per year, reducing carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by 217,700 tonnes. But the power plant is part of a larger project, the Huaneng Dezhou Dingzhuang, which also includes the installation of a 100 MW wind farm and battery storage systems, for a total capacity of 8 MWh (already in operation today). The Dingzhuang solar power plant is part of the 2020 list of priority energy projects in Shandong Province.