While floating solar -- the emerging practice of putting solar panels on bodies of water -- is promising in its efficiency and its potential to spare agricultural and conservation lands, a new experiment finds environmental trade-offs.
In the first manipulative field study examining the environmental impacts of floating solar, published in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers found that floating solar panels increased greenhouse gas emissions on small ponds by nearly 27%.
Grodsky and collaborators covered three ponds at the Cornell Experimental Pond Facility with solar panels, at 70% coverage, and found that, almost immediately, methane and carbon dioxide emissions increased -- by 26.8% compared to ponds without solar panels -- and dissolved oxygen throughout the ponds substantially decreased.
The data is particularly important because much of the floating solar development in the U.S. is currently happening on small lakes and ponds, Grodsky said. It's also timely for New York state, where floating solar could be considered as an alternative to terrestrial solar and is the source of debate and exploration.
"If you look at the history of energy transitions -- from wood to fossil fuels, for example -- everything was based on energy production, and the environment wasn't taken into consideration, and now we have environmental injustice, we have climate change," Grodsky said."The idea here is to nip that in the bud and re-envision the way we approach this energy transition.
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