By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The Three Gorges Group project commenced in July of this year and is expected to be completed and fully streamlined by May 2018.
On Sunday, Xinhua reported that state-run China’s Three Gorges Group is building the world’s largest floating solar power plant.
The renewable energy project, according to the news agency, will cost about US$150 million and will be constructed in the eastern region of the Asian nation.
The 150-megawatt floating plant consists of panels affixed to flotation mechanism positioned on a lake which was formed from a collapsed coal mine.
The project commenced in July of this year and is expected to be completed and fully streamlined by May 2018.
Currently, the grid is partially connected to the plant.
National Energy Administration data suggests that approximately 5.6 percent of solar power generation was idle in the first three-quarters of the year.
China’s previous ‘biggest floating solar project’ farm generated a modest 40-megawatt output and was located in the same province, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Chinese floating solar farms have grown exponentially in popularity as they are viewed as a sufficient solution to grid congestion.
Via TeleSur
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
If large floating complexes can be made benign to the local wildlife, this is something that changes the rules of economics. There’s an old saying that real estate is valuable because they can’t manufacture more land. In fact, we do something worse; developers steal land from nature and so many of us are complicit in the economy that they’ve built and control through bought politicians that we act helpless when records floods destroy our cities because the water encounters only concrete.
Real estate speculation is the foundation of the value of the American economy. The factories we’ve lost have been replaced by overbuilding of homes and malls with no clear future. Educated progressives flee the bigoted exurbs for cities, only to find that by doing so they’ve run up rents on overcrowded apartments so high that the residents, especially of color, are driven out. The fracking boom continues because every voter living on the shale fields thinks their little piece of land will get bought, and that will make up for the earthquakes.
If we can safely live on the water and extract energy from there, we can collapse the real estate bubble and destroy the power of developers and rentiers over our politics. We can expand our cities with affordable housing and drain our real swamp – rural and suburban America – of its poor masses yearning to be free.