Boland Hydropower

  The Council of Ministers on Wednesday said it will review a proposed 150MW hydropower project on the upper reaches of the Tatai River in Koh Kong province’s northern Thma Bang district. Proposals for a 500kV transmission line connecting Phnom Penh to the Cambodia-Lao border and another one linking Battambang province with the Cambodian-Thai border will also be on the agenda when the Council of Ministers convenes on Friday. Victor Jona, the director-general of the Ministry of Mines and Energy’s General Department of Energy, told The Post that the proposals were submitted to the Council of Ministers following completion of their associated environmental and social impact assessments. He voiced his approval for the project and said minister Suy Sem would back it at the meeting. He said one of the transmission lines would deliver electricity from a coal-fired power plant in Laos, as outlined in a purchase agreement that Cambodia signed last year. The other line would import power fro...

  A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the US Department of Energy, suggests that if floating solar panels are deployed on the more than 379,000 hydro reservoirs globally, the resultant hybrid systems could generate anywhere from 16% to 40% of the world’s demand for electricity. In a press release, the NREL says adding floating solar panels to bodies of water that are already home to hydropower stations could produce as much as 7.6 terawatts of potential power a year from the solar PV systems alone. That’s equivalent to 10,600 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. In comparison, global final electricity consumption was just over 22,300 terawatt-hours in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the International Energy Agency. Actually, some researchers think that 40% number is more than a little optimistic. They suggest the number should be closer to 16% than 40%. John Sherwin, program director at the U...