Credits
China has accustomed many to its ambitious projects for the production of energy from renewable sources: the last, complete and working since last May, is a colossal floating solar farm built on a lake above what was once an excavation for coal mining.
Created by Sungrow Power Supply, the "solar farm" is made up of 166,000 photovoltaic panels arranged on a 4 to 10 meter deep body of water, not far from the Chinese city of Huainan, in Anhui province. It is currently the largest floating solar park in the world: a 40-megawatt plant, sufficient to power consumption (relatively low) of about 15,000 homes and, on paper, designed to work for 25 years.
The lake is located in a site once used for mining. When the coal mine collapsed, the lake was formed in the crater, which now serves as a base for the panels. Placing photovoltaic systems in artificial reservoirs allows the preservation of terrestrial vegetation and fauna, but also improves the thermal control of the panels, improving their efficiency - unfortunately still low for these technologies, and even more for industrial applications .
The conversion of a former carboniferous area to a clean energy factory takes place in a country where the burning of coal has been responsible for 366 thousand premature deaths in 2013 . Although there is still much to be done, and thanks to the Paris climate agreements , China has become one of the world's first renewable energy sources: the objective declared by their Ministry of Development is to create 13 millions of jobs in the sector by 2020.
Also in the province of Anhui, work is underway to build an even larger, 150-megawatt power plant, which will serve 94,000 homes from May 2018. Coal is still the main source of 40% of global electricity , but China ( the world's first emitter of greenhouse gases ) is also one of the biggest nations to lead its progressive abandonment. Last year, the Chinese government decreed the cancellation of 104 new coal plants that were being built in 13 provinces of the country.
All this while in the United States the Trump Administration has announced that it will impose 30% tariffs (which will fall to 15% over four years) on the import of solar panels in the USA, to revitalize the American coal industry.
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