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.
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 Dec. 6 in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers found that floating solar panels increased greenhouse gas emissions on small ponds by nearly 27%.
“There have been a flurry of papers about floating solar, but it’s mostly modeling and projections,” said Steven Grodsky, assistant professor of natural resources and the environment and assistant unit leader of the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as well as a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “This is the first manipulative study to produce empirical results. It’s saying, here’s what’s actually happening. And what we found was that there was increased greenhouse gas emissions from ponds with floating solar.”
Read More: Cornell University
A research team led by Steven Grodsky, assistant professor and assistant unit leader of the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, installed floating solar panels at the Cornell Experimental Pond Facility in 2023. (Photo Credit: Jason Koski/Cornell University)
