Five examples of solar farms seen from above, and an Australian solar expert breaks down the latest innovations in materials technology and module deployment.
By Lachlan Haycock
Solar farms on land and water are at once impressive displays of human innovation and intricate examples of energy infrastructure visible from space.
And with the size – by area and by capacity – of these power stations continually increasing, new records are always being set.
Consider the Bhadla Solar Park in India, near the border with Pakistan.
Despite the high temperatures and wind storms in this part of the Thar Desert making for a low population density, the long hours of bright sunshine are perfect for power generation at the 5700-ha, 2245-MW facility.
Then there’s floating solar.
Omkareshwar Reservoir, on the Narmada River in central India, boasts a capacity of 987 million m3.
A pair of floating solar projects, at 126 MW and 90 MW respectively, have adorned the water’s surface in recent months.
Floating solar has also surfaced in Ramagundam, 500 km to the southeast, which has a 100-MW capacity, and in Kayamkulam, 1400 km to the south, which has a 92-MW capacity.
Then there’s the city of Dezhou in China’s Shandong province, where, nestled among a patchwork of fields, a floating solar array has sprung up on a nearby reservoir.
China’s solar efforts don’t stop there, as the country is home to some of the world’s largest solar farms by capacity – including in Xinjiang, which boasts a massive 5 GW facility, and Golmud, where an array had reached a capacity of 2.8 GW in 2024.
In the US, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System occupies a vast swath of the Mojave Desert plain.
The 386-MW project consists of three solar concentrating thermal power plants.
In a standout use case of heliostat mirror technology, heliostat fields focus solar energy on power tower receivers near the center of each array.
Each plant features “a Rankine-cycle reheat steam turbine [that] receives live steam from the solar collector located in the power block at the top of a tower”, according to the California Energy Commission.
“Each plant also includes two natural gas-fired steam boilers: an auxiliary boiler and a night-time preservation boiler. The auxiliary boiler is used for thermal input to the steam turbine during the morning start-up cycle to assist the plant in coming up to operating temperature.
“The auxiliary boiler is also operated during transient cloudy conditions, in order to maintain the steam turbine.”
Land vs sea
Here in Australia, the industry is burgeoning by comparison.
“Australia’s largest solar farms are much smaller than those elsewhere in the world, probably by a factor of four to five,” Jacek Jasieniak, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Monash University, told create.
“There are planned solar farms that are much bigger – in the gigawatt ranges or higher – but they’re yet to come to fruition. With the Federal Government aligning to net zero and focusing on the energy transition, we need to be able to accelerate the deployment of solar technologies.”
The Western Downs Green Power Hub near Chinchilla, Queensland, is among the country’s largest, with a 400-MW capacity.
Comparing the Australian context to the global, Jasieniak is unsure if floating solar fixtures are the right solution for this country.
“As soon as you move towards water-based systems, a range of complexities, especially with the electrical systems, emerge,” he said. “Then there’s corrosion and other factors that you’d have to worry about.
“On-the-ground installations in typically remote areas are the most viable in Australia. Considering the variability in coastal conditions, we would struggle to implement effective floating solar in those areas.”
Module material
With engineers pushing the limits of efficiency of silicon-based solar technology, according to Jasieniak, driving innovation in materials technology and the deployment of solar modules is the “grand challenge”.
“Efficiency has progressively been the driver, in addition to lowering the cost of the modules,” he said.
“One of the areas that we’re working on at ARENA-funded Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics is the development of tandem structures on silicon that can effectively bolster the efficiencies of silicon panels – from the current best-practice level of 27 per cent conversion to beyond 30 per cent.”
But innovation in the module design needs to be tied into deployment, which is impacted by factors such as weight.
“The heavy nature of even a single panel – which could weigh 30-40 kg – creates restrictions on how they can be deployed,” Jasieniak said. “A larger pool of people is needed, and that creates an added cost when considering the extra skills and time required.
“By shifting away from thick and heavy glass-based geometries to thinned-out, non-glass geometries which are extremely thin – typically half a centimetre in thickness versus 3-4 cm – we start to achieve peripheral advantages.”
Deployment demands
Companies such as 5B and MonSol are investigating how we move beyond fixed-tilt solar mounting systems.
“It’s about how we fabricate solar cell arrays that allow for some degree of automation during deployment,” Jasieniak said. “These companies are developing solar cells that effectively can be unfolded onsite, reducing the complexity of panel-by-panel installation.
The deployment challenge is inherently linked to the design of the underlying solar cells.
While large glass-based photovoltaics provide environmental stability, they are also bulky, heavy and brittle. And the bigger a panel gets, especially in wind regions, the more it bends.
“That means it can fracture and snap. And so it becomes quite a challenge to maintain the mechanical stability of these cells in a cost-effective way.
“To avoid that, there is an opportunity to move beyond glass and think about encapsulation layers that are polymeric, more flexible and tailored to prevent water and oxygen ingress, while also providing self-cleaning functionality.”
Professor Jacek Jasieniak is the co-author of a research paper (currently in peer review, but made openly accessible) that outlines a new method of mapping the levelised cost of electricity for installed photovoltaic energy, accounting for differences in panel, balance-of-system, installation and transportation costs, as well as the system’s yield.
Further reading
