To secure the growing energy demand due to the rise in population and technological advancements, countries worldwide are looking for alternatives or complementary generation sources to support the existing grid infrastructure and power generating system. The increase in global temperature and climate change forces each country to switch to clean energy production.  Among the renewable energy sources, the Floating Photovoltaic (FPV) market is flourishing in various countries. It is a good source of power generation avoiding land constraint issues and adding extra benefits like cooling of panels and reducing evaporation and algal bloom problems of water sources where it is installed. In fact, as a part of a complementary generation, the idea of using unused reservoir water surface of reservoir for the deployment of photovoltaic (PV) is a considerable solution for meeting energy demand.  As hydropower and PV are dispatchable and non-dispatchable sources of energy, they can complement each other well. The floating PV and hydropower basics and factors that complement their mutual operation are discussed in this research work with a literature review. Case studies of tropical and mediterranean climatic countries like Myanmar and Albania are analyzed using HOMER Pro. The various challenges associated with this hybrid hydro-floating PV project are evaluated using risk analysis, and the highest risk elements are identified.

The focus of the research is on the development of the concept of floating flexible thin film arrays for renewable electricity generation, in marine and lacustrine application areas. This research was motivated by reliability issues from wave energy converters which are prone to large loads due to the environment which they are exposed in; a flexible system would not need to withstand these loads but simply yield to them. The solid state power take off is an advantage of photovoltaic (PV) technology which removes failure risks associated with mechanical machinery, and also potential environmental hazards such as hydraulic oil spillage. The novelty of this technology requires some development before it could even be considered feasible for large scale installation. Techno-economics are a big issue in electricity developments and need to be scoped in order to ensure that they would be cost-competitive in the market and with other technologies. Other more technical issues relate to the change in expected electrical yield due to the modulation of the PV array according to the waves and the electrical performance of the PVs when in wet conditions. Results from numerical modelling of the modulating arrays show that there is not expected variation in electrical yield at central latitudes (slightly positive), although at higher latitudes there could be considerable depreciation. With regards to the electrical performance a notable improvement was measured due to the cooling effect, slight decrease in performance was also estimated due to water absorption (of ~ 1.4%) within the panels. Overall results from both economic and technical analysis show the feasibility of the concept and that it is a possibility for future commercialisation.

The use of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have expanded rapidly the last decade and today’s market includes several different solar utilizations, where floating PV is one of them. Previous studies have shown how floating PV systems increase the PV efficiency and at the same time reduce the water evaporation. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and optimize energy solutions using floating PV systems for a shrimp farm cultivation in Thailand, where the technical, environmental and economic aspects will be included. The optimizations have been done in the open source model OptiCE, where genetic algorithm (AG) have been used to maximize the renewable reliability and minimize the Levelized Costs of Electricity (LCOE). In order to find the optimal renewable solution for the investigated shrimp farm, four scenarios have been compared considering different PV system combinations. The simulated results showed how the scenarios considering floating PV system generated a higher reliability than the scenarios considering ground-mounted PV system. The scenario considered tracking PV system increased the system´s renewable reliability compared to fixed PV system. However the shrimp farm is connected to the national electric grid or not will have a huge impact on the LCOE due to the low electric price and the implemented feed-in-tariff (FIT) program. The size of the installed PV capacity significantly affects the reliability results were the capacity of 200 kWp reaches a reliability of almost 100%. The optimal solution for the investigated shrimp farm to become independent is therefore to install a combined floating PV and battery storage system.