Long popular in Asia, floating solar catches on in US

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The sun rises over floating solar panels on May 3, 2023, in Selangor, Malaysia. Floating solar panel farms are beginning to boom in the United States after rapid growth in Asia. They're attractive not just for their clean power and lack of a land footprint, but because they also conserve water by preventing evaporation. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

By ISABELLA O’MALLEY

May 10, 2023 AP

When Joe Seaman-Graves, the city planner for the working class town of Cohoes, New York, Googled the term “floating solar,” he didn’t even know it was a thing.

What he did know is that his tiny town needed an affordable way to get electricity and had no extra land. But looking at a map, one feature stood out.

“We have this 14-acre water reservoir,” he said.

Seaman-Graves soon found the reservoir could hold enough solar panels to power all the municipal buildings and streetlights, saving the city more than $500,000 each year. He had stumbled upon a form of clean energy that is steeply ramping up.

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