Japan isn’t very big. To be exact, the island nation is 145,925 square miles, or roughly the size of Montana. What’s more, the land that is available to develop is often unlevel, even mountainous. All of this means that, for the densely populated country of Japan, building factories for energy production on flat land has been significantly more difficult than it has been for other nations around the world. As a result, one of the Japan’s most pressing concerns over the past century has been producing enough power to satisfy the needs of its 127 million residents. Yet the country might have just discovered a solution to its topographic obstacle: massive solar panels floating atop bodies of water.
This week, Kyocera and Century Tokyo Leasing announced that they have begun constructing what they say will be the world’s largest floating solar installation in terms of power produced. The two companies plan to build the floating module—made up of 51,000 solar panels—on the surface of the Yamakura Dam reservoir, roughly 43 miles southeast of Tokyo. Proponents of the plan note that floating solar plants are easy to assemble and less damaging to the environment. There’s no need for heavy equipment to dig up the earth to build power plants; the solar panels can clip together, with the smaller solar farms able to be constructed in one week. Furthermore, after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011, the people of Japan have less appetite for intensive, potentially harmful energy sources.
Kyocera says the solar panels will not only alleviate some of Japan’s energy concerns but also help the local environment, by reducing water evaporation and slowing algae growth in the shaded areas. The company states that, come 2018, when the solar panel farm at the Yamakura Dam reservoir is fully functional, it will have a capacity of 16,170 megawatt hours per year—enough electricity to power nearly 5,000 households in the region.