SolarDuck launches frst foatng solar panel platorm

SOLARDUCK, A DUTCH RENEWABLE ENERGY START-UP, RECENTLY LAUNCHED ITS FIRST FLOATING SOLAR ENERGY PROJECT. THE PROJECT – ALSO CALLED THE DEMONSTRATOR – CONSISTS OF FOUR TRIANGULAR PLATFORMS COVERED WITH SOLAR PANELS RESTING ON FLOATERS.

The foatng platorms were towed upriver from Gorinchem, where they were built at Damen Shipyards, to its test locaton in IJzendoorn. “I’m incredibly proud”, says Don Hoogendoorn, SolarDuck’s CTO. “For months, we have been perfectng the technological design, afer which we built the Demonstrator within seven months. From a technological point of view – our team has over 80 years of shared experience in maritme technology – we knew the platorms were built robustly, but a 50km high-speed towing route is the ultmate real-life test. During such a path, the forces are far beyond those you would experience at sea. And our platorms passed the test with fying colours.”

“This Demonstrator – our frst project – is only the beginning”, confrms Head of Business Development, Olaf de Swart. Although the company has only been in

full-tme business since October, global project demand has been high and stretches from Bermuda to Japan. The main driving forces behind this market are a global ambiton to get to net zero on the one hand, and a lack of space to place solar panels on the other. “The absence of available land is mainly seen on islands, in megacites such as Tokyo or Singapore, and on ofshore platorms, which are therefore our target markets. But we even have project proposals from Oman, where land prices are so high that people prefer to look towards the sea for their solar energy need.”

The start-up hardly has any tme to sit back and enjoy its victory. “We have no tme to rest on our laurels. Today, we’ll take pride in the project we built with our consortum of Engie Solutons, DSM Advanced Solar, Chint

Solar, Damen Shipyards Group, and Dekker Groep. Tomorrow, it’s all hands on deck for our second project, which will foat on the sea and is currently in details design”, asserts CEO Koen Burgers. The market for ofshore foatng solar panels is stll young, but is exponentally growing and will, according to NREL, in the future reach a size of 7,600GW. This is due to the fact that within the sunbelt – the part of our planet that is sun rich, but wind scarce – solar is by far the cheapest method to produce renewable energy, but land is hard to come by. Mr Burgers is pleased with the ambitous atmosphere in the market, “When we founded SolarDuck, we knew we wanted to change the world and add our bit to a sustainable future. Our global pipeline is currently already in the hundreds of megawat peaks. Receiving worldwide recogniton for your product at such an early stage is amazing. Now it is our job to make our ambiton come to fruiton.”