Floating Solar Farm Market - Forecast(2023 - 2028)

The Global market for Floating Solar Farm is forecast to reach $2.1 Billion by 2025, growing at CAGR 20% from 2020 to 2025. The market growth is mainly driven by the factors including scarcity of land for land based solar farms, simple installation, and deployment with a high degree of modularity on sites, limited anchoring, and mooring requirements. Moreover, as floating solar farm are anchored at a particular position, they can be conveniently transported around the water body, thereby providing a portability factor.  These factors are set to boosts the market growth for floating solar farm during the forecast period 2020-2025

The report: “Floating Solar Farm Market – Forecast (2020-2025)”, by IndustryARC covers an in-depth analysis of the following segments of the Floating solar farm market. 

By Location: Onshore, Offshore

By Capacity: Up to 1MW, 1MW - 5MW, Above 5MW

By Connectivity: On grid, Off-grid

By Application: Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Others

By Geography: North America (U.S, Canada, Mexico), South America (Brazil, Argentina and others), Europe(Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Others), APAC(China, Japan India, South Korea, Australia and Others), and ROW (Middle East and Africa)

Floating Solar Farm Market is segmented into onshore and offshore based on location. The market for onshore held the highest market share in 2019 and it is estimated to witness the significant market growth during the forecast period 2020-2025. Onshore floating solar farms are constructed on inland water bodies including lakes, rivers, ponds, and others. Establishment of floating solar farms on such water bodies are cost effective in comparison to offshore solar farms as these are not subjected to heavy winds, wave action, moisture and harsh corrosive environment which lowers its construction and maintenance costs. In deep offshore environment, large water waves during cyclones, corrosive environment results in damage to the solar farm’s floating structure and the panels owing to which the installation as well as the maintenance cost is significantly high. In September 2020, Vattenfall inaugurated its first floating solar farm in Gendringen, the Netherlands. The solar farm has a capacity of 1.2 megawatts. It was built on the site of a sand and gravel extraction company Netterden. The water cools the panels naturally, which increases their efficiency compared to land-based solar panels. The growing preference to floating solar farms in the developed and developing economies, owing to lack of availability of large land area for the conventional land based solar farms is set to drive the market for onshore Floating Solar Farm Market during 2020-2025

APAC region held the highest market share of 65% of global Floating Solar Farm Market in 2019. Moreover, APAC region is also estimated to witness significant market growth during the forecast period 2020-2025. Land accessible in most Asian countries is much smaller due to its high population density. Growing investments around the renewable sector serve as growth multipliers for floating solar farm market. In July 2020, according to Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) report Asia leads Europe in deploying floating solar farm. In March 2018, China built a huge floating solar farm on top of a deserted coal mine. At the end of 2018, both Japan and China had a total FPV installed capacity of 1.3GW. Vietnam also installed 47 MW of FPV.  In addition to it, National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), India's largest power generation company, announced that it has 200 MW of FPV under construction across four locations, making it one of the world's largest developers. Furthermore, involvement of major market players in this region, coupled with ongoing research and advancements in technical innovations, is poised to create tremendous growth opportunities for APAC Floating Solar Farm Market from 2020 to 2025. 

Combination of hydropower generation with floating solar farm provide promising results as hydropower reservoirs alone cover a surface of more than 250 thousand square kilometers worldwide that is sufficient to host floating solar farm of significant power output. On the other hand, floating solar farm can be used to boost the power generation from hydropower plant and may also help to generate power during the low water availability.  The ease of combination along with the mutual benefits of floating solar farm and hydropower plant is set to drive the market growth.

Floating solar farms remove the need for costly land areas, particularly agricultural land near any substation, for solar energy harvesting. In most countries, demand for land-based solar construction has lifted the prices of even wastelands. This high land prices are reflected in the total cost of land-based solar power generation. Floating solar farms are mounted on water surfaces that eliminate the need for land site construction and its associated costs thereby driving the adoption.

The installation cost of floating solar plant is higher in the short term than the cost of a ground-mounted solar pant installation. This is due to the technical complexity of the design, construction, and operation on the water, especially the anchoring, mooring systems and electrical installations. These technical complexities majorly arise as the structures needs to be light weighed to float on water as well as should have to structural integrity to hold the panels in proper position even during low to medium windy weather conditions. These challenges are poised to impede the floating solar farms market growth during early to mid-stages of the forecast period 2020-2025, post which the R&D on material and PV technology is set to offset this challenge

Partnerships and acquisitions along with product launches are the key strategies adopted by the players in the Floating solar farm market. As of 2019, the market for Floating Solar Farm Market is consolidated with the top players including Sulzer Ltd., Trina Solar, Yellow Tropus Pvt. Ltd., Wuxi Suntech Power Co., Ltd., Talesun, Ciel & Terre International, LONGi Solar, KYOCERA Corporation, JA SOLAR Technology Co. Ltd., Hanwha Group, Vikram Solar Limited and among others.