Japan Building World's Largest Floating Solar Power Plant

Kyocera Corp. has come up with a smart way to build and deploy solar power plants without gobbling up precious agricultural land in space-challenged Japan:  build the plants on freshwater dams and lakes.
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Kyocera TCL Solar and joint-venture partner Century Tokyo Leasing Corp. (working together with Ciel et Terre, based in Lille, France) already have three sizable water-based installations in operation near the city of Kobe, in the island of Honshu’s Hyogo Prefecture.  Now they’ve begun constructing what they claim is the world’s largest floating solar plant, in Chiba, near Tokyo.

The 13.7-megawatt power station, being built for Chiba Prefecture’s Public Enterprise Agency, is located on the Yamakura Dam reservoir, 75 kilometers east of the capital.  It will consist of some 51,000 Kyocera solar modules covering an area of 180,000 square meters, and will generate an estimated 16,170 megawatt-hours annually.  That is “enough electricity to power approximately 4,970 typical households,” says Kyocera.  That capacity is sufficient to offset 8,170 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, the amount put into the atmosphere by consuming 19,000 barrels of oil.

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