Floating Solar builds solar power on water. Their signature system is a rotating floating island: a circular field of panels, up to about 140 metres across, that turns around a vertical axis to follow the sun. Shore-mounted electric winches from Dromec pull the island into position via cables, and the tracking can raise the yield substantially compared to a fixed setup. The system runs on Dutch drinking-water basins, including the PWN site at Andijk and the Evides site in Rotterdam.
Rotating a 140-metre island with winches raises an obvious question: how do you know, at every moment, exactly where the island is? That is where the floating solar GNSS connection with marXact comes in.
How the floating solar GNSS connection works
marXact GNSS receivers deliver centimetre-accurate RTK positions in the open field, and open water is about as open as a field gets. The positions stream to UNI-Cloud, and through the real-time UNI-Cloud API the control side has live access to them. Position data measured to the centimetre, available the moment it exists: exactly what a system that steers a floating structure needs.
This is the same API that powers our other real-time integrations, from fibre registration to field workflows. The receiver does not care whether it is standing on a pole in a trench or mounted on a floating structure; it delivers the position, and the API delivers it onward.
Beyond the daily operation
The build phase leans on the same accuracy. Anchor points, mooring lines and shore installations are positioned and documented with the receiver during construction, so the as-built record of the installation matches the water, not the drawing.
For readers who want the wider picture of what our receivers and cloud platform do on regular land, our explainer on digital surveying and how to get started is the place to begin.
Van start gaan
The building blocks are marXact GNSS receivers with an RTK correction subscription and UNI-Cloud; the technical side runs through the UNI-Cloud API, which gives partner systems real-time access to positions. Receiver, app, cloud environment and corrections come as one package: the UNI-Collect Survey Package.
Building something that moves and needs to know where it is? Contact us, we like those questions.