Usinas fotovoltaicas flutuantes em reservatórios do Ceará

Abstract

Water scarcity in semi-arid regions of northeastern Brazil has always been a matter of debate, as water availability is a limiting factor in socioeconomic development. Studies on evaporation losses in reservoirs provide better control over the use of stored water and facilitate the establishment of public policies aimed at the rational use of water. The use of floating photovoltaic plants operating in reservoirs in the semi-arid region of Ceará can establish mutual compensation, allowing to provide much of the energy consumed in the region and reduce the evaporation of water from the reservoirs. Floating photovoltaic systems have several advantages compared to systems mounted on land, the main one being its greater generation efficiency due to reductions in the operating temperatures of the photovoltaic modules. Since Ceará has high solar radiation and a large number of reservoirs, the objective of this work is to evaluate the mutual compensation between floating photovoltaic systems and the Ceará reservoirs. To this end, several reservoirs were analyzed in order to cover most of Ceará's territory. Once the reservoirs were defined, the Penman method was used to estimate evaporation in the surface condition of the free reservoir and covered by floating photovoltaic systems. The simulation of power generation was carried out using a methodology that combines the efficiency in function of temperature with the incident irradiance. As a last step, a scenario for the generation of electric energy from photovoltaic plants floating on the waters of ten reservoirs in the state of Ceará was developed, which would provide the service of 19.32% of the electric energy demand in the state of Ceará and the reduction evaporation rate of 12.88hm³ / year, which corresponds to the consumption of 2.81% of the state's population.