By Ayesha Saba ISLAMABAD, Feb 03 (INP-WealthPK): The need to generate electricity through renewable sources is being felt more acutely now than before to put brakes on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the use of carbon-based fossil fuels to produce power. Over the past few years, some progress has been made to harvest energy from cheap renewable resources such as solar, wind and hydel. In this respect, the Floating Solar Photovoltaic (FSPV) system has gained significance, offering effective solutions to the challenges the world is facing due to alarmingly high use of environmentally hazardous fuels. This system has also resolved the problem of large swathes of land being used to install land PV. Installation of FSPV is a coherent substitute to the land-based PV systems for harnessing the solar energy. This system can be installed in water bodies such as oceans, dams, reservoirs, lakes, fish farms, canals, and waste treatment plants. The demand for FSPV installations has been on the rise worldwide, creating new opportunities to scale up solar energy generation, particularly in countries with high population density, competing uses for available land, or where natural or artificial water bodies are available for different reasons or uses. The floating solar is a relatively new application of PV technologies, with markets growing in Asia, Australia and Europe. Over 250 floating solar plants have been documented around the world from 5kW to 40MW. The capacity of floating solar is increasing at an exponential rate. Asia is expected to account for roughly two-third of the global demand, mostly driven by China, India, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. China is the world’s largest market for FPV. The market for floating solar panels reached over 60MW in 2015, and is expected to rise by over 45% by 2024. Pakistan as a developing country needs to do a lot more to meet its residential and industrial energy needs through greener sources of energy, and the solar power is best of all. The country can rid itself of vicious circular debt in the energy sector by turning to FSPV and other greener sources of power generation. In recent times, significant efforts have been made by the government and the private sector to adopt floating PV systems as an alternative to conventional energy sources. The government is planning to install floating solar panels on the country’s mega water reservoirs and along canals in a bid to generate thousands of megawatts of clean energy. Assistant director of Alternate Energy Development Board (AEDB) Mohammad Yasin told INP-WealthPK that as Pakistan is largely an agricultural country, it should focus on floating PV systems rather than land PV to save land resources. “Pakistan has a large number of water bodies where FPV initiatives can be implemented.” Mr Yasin says it will be a great initiative on the part of the government to introduce a FSPV plant on a dam. “It can be a revolutionary step in the domain of renewable energy system.” He also disclosed that installation of such a plant is under consideration. “At present, floating photovoltaic technology is emerging as one of the competitive solutions to the energy issues throughout the world.” In the context of Pakistan’s FSPV potential, the country possesses one of the largest canal systems with some large dams like Tarbela Dam, Mangla Dam etc and river systems (Indus River). Deployment of FSPV on such water bodies can harvest a large amount of electrical energy, which in turn can have positive outcomes in the form of reduced dependency on carbon-based fuels for power generation, he stressed.