Positive Impact

...or at least not negative.

It was real pleasure to speak at Floating Solar in Europe 2024 last week in Amsterdam by the invitation of Khushboo Goyal during the Developers’ Plans and Experience panel moderated by Coenraad de Vries and shared the minds with Michele Tagliapietra of BayWa r.e. Global , Charles Gery of RWE and Julieta Ferreira da Silva of Voltalia .

Honestly, I personally found the event as an astonishing one to see the number of companies working on finding solutions to the challenges of floating solar systems' reliability, scalability and cost competitiveness.

There are many benefits of floating solar including optimal land use (reservoirs, ponds and other bodies of water offer an alternative method of installing solar systems which don’t compete with valuable real estate), increased efficiency (water has a cooling effect on the solar panels, helping regulate their temperature during hot weather conditions), reduced algae growth (shading effect of floating solar panels can limit excessive sunlight exposure to the water’s surface, reducing the growth of algae), power grid synergy (floating solar farms can be strategically located near power demand centres or close to existing hydropower facilities) and the most interesting for me is water conservation (covering water bodies with floating solar panels can reduce water evaporation.

This is particularly important in regions facing water scarcity and can contribute to water conservation efforts. By reducing evaporation, the panels help preserve water resources, maintain reservoir levels, and support aquatic ecosystems that rely on stable water levels)

Water scarcity and water-related hazards also impact the European continent. As indicated by the European Commission, 38% of the EU population and 29% of EU territory was affected by water scarcity in 2019. In general, water scarcity is more likely to occur in southern Europe, extending to western Europe where high water abstraction can impact water availability. In southern Europe, the largest use of freshwater comes from the agriculture sector.

Floating solar, with all those subdued benefits, should also tell stories about environmental and societal impact instead of trying to match terrestrial solar's cost. This does not mean that we should place floaties over all ponds or lakes to cover entire surface, but there is an optimum proportion to have net positive ESG impact.

SolarPower Europe published Floating PV Best Practice Guidelines in December 2023, please take a look at it.

Water and the Sun

Lake Tuz (Turkish: Tuz Gölü meaning 'Salt Lake'; anciently Tatta in Ancient Greek Τάττα, in Latin: Tatta Lacus) was the second largest lake in Turkey with its 1,665 km2 surface area and one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world. In recent years, Lake Tuz has become a hotspot for tourists. In October 2021, Lake Tuz dried up completely.

A study based on satellite imagery conducted by Turkey’s Ege University shows that water levels at Lake Tuz started to drop beginning in 2000, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. The lake completely receded this year due to rising temperatures, intensified evaporation and insufficient rain, according to the study.

For centuries, Lake Tuz in central Turkey has hosted huge colonies of flamingos that migrate and breed there when the weather is warm, feeding on algae in the lake’s shallow waters as reported by an Independent article in 2021.

Studies have shown that deploying floating PV on water surfaces can reduce water evaporation, and increase water efficiency. Reducing water evaporation can bring substantial benefits to drought-prone areas and regions, by saving substantial amounts of water. In the study conducted by Georgia Kakoulaki et al. it is shown that minimising evaporation, can provide yearly water savings of between 7,000 – 10,000 m3 per installed MWp of floating PV.

Floating solar should tell its positive ESG impact much better and more consistently in every opportunity. There are many other even larger lakes like Aral Sea, those could have been saved or their life could have been extended by using floating solar most likely before they disappeared from the Earth's surface like a Martian ancient lakes.

Accountability Ladder

Rung 2 | Blaming Others

This is the phase where people want to shift the uncomfortable spotlight from themselves onto someone else. Whilst this can temporarily ease the pressure, it doesn’t make you feel better in the long run, it doesn’t get us to a solution faster, it damages relationships and it can make us feel guilty and ashamed later on.

This stage is a bit like the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment – where children were given the choice between 1 immediate marshmallow or 2 marshmallows if they waited for a period of time. The study was to test instant gratification or delayed gratification. Like the experiment, you have 2 choices:

1. Cast blame for the immediate spotlight to be off of you (1 immediate ‘reward’) or

2. Be accountable, explain what you could have done differently and find solutions going forward (2 much more satisfying rewards).

So before you go to cast blame on someone else, ask yourself whether you are choosing to take 1 or 2 marshmallows today?

To drive the importance home, here are 2 further points to consider:

1. In follow up studies, they found that the children who had waited and taken 2 marshmallows were more successful in life.
2. Blaming others in no way guarantees you that the spotlight will come off of you. In fact, you will likely develop a reputation for it, be considered untrustworthy, lose relationships and be even more likely to be considered responsible for the failure. People catch on quickly so don’t be known as the person that blames the world, make it known that you own issues and take action to get results.

Book Bits: Reading List of February 2024

📚 China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict: an internal view of a distinguished Chinese economist offers a timely, essential exploration of China’s perspective on economy, government, society, and its position in the world. Dr. David Daokui Li has served as an advisor to senior Chinese Communist Party, writing with some degree of bias naturally, in response to the growing anti-Chinese sentiment and alarmed by the threat of war, the author pulls from his wealth of firsthand experience to demystify contemporary Chinese society and advocate for understanding between China and the West. In this urgently needed and fascinating book, he explains the inner workings of a rising superpower to help the world understand how it works and how to work with it.

📚 The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land dates back to 2010 while on 28% of solar modules were supplied by China with comparing 81% of 2023. So the issue has been there long time ago before solar cost of energy matches and undercuts the fossil fuel's cost.

The book not only provides a newcomer to the subject with a description of the competing representations of the region’s contentious politics, but it also offers those interested in issues of ethnic marginalization a window into the dynamics of government policy and varying forms of organized and everyday resistance.

After the riots of July 2009, few could doubt the extent of hostility to Chinese rule among Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Yet with resistance remaining sporadic and disorganized, and opportunities for field research highly constrained, the conflict in Xinjiang presents challenges to the traditional methods of political scientists. This book is introduced as a study of "representational" politics in two senses of the word: the first is delegation, i.e., who has the right to speak in Xinjiang. The second is representation itself: the conflicting narratives of Xinjiang's past and present, which are pitted against each other in the competition for local and international opinion. The book's source material consists of a wide variety of such representations, ranging from internal party bulletins and scholarly position papers, to Uyghur counterclaims as expressed in everyday speech, subversive songs, and on the Internet.

📚 Supply Chain Risk Management: Cases and Industry Insights provides a holistic and practical approach to managing supply chains risks and presents a new framework model for sustainable optimization of risk management. This framework includes supportive tools for risk mapping and strategic decision-making. Managers can apply tailored versions of this framework for the management process of their respective sector especially in solar value chain transparency challenges.

📚 The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis is a guidebook for climate activism and active participation. It also functions, in a way, as a kind of climate self-help book for the many who feel crushed under the ‘fatal knowledge’ of everything to come. In this way, the book fills a large but closing gap in the climate narrative, where hopelessness and incapacitating nihilism have the monopoly. Yet it is to the authors’ credit that the story of optimism and hope that they tell is not a whitewashed or reductive one. The book does not turn a blind eye to the true, horrifying depths of the crisis. They instead show that a gritty, grounded optimism is always available to us, even as we look at the crisis dead-on. 

📚 Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth: The environmental perspective of degrowth is gaining traction. A couple months ago the European Union parliament held a multiday conference “Beyond Growth” featuring many speakers aligned with the perspective. Degrowth is even making inroads on the socialist left. Two years ago the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in New York City published an article, “Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing.” In Japan, the ecological Marxist Kohei Saito has sold five hundred thousand copies of a book laying out a case for degrowth communism. He is also authors of another best seller Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism.