Focus on Arts and Ecology

Reports of whales trapped in fishing gear are on the rise worldwide, as are the risky attempts of ‘disentanglers’ to free them. 

By Daniel Cressey, April 24, 2024

In 2004, a humpback whale was spotted entangled in fishing gear in Banderas Bay, a small bight on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in which the resort town of Puerto Vallarta nestles.

This area is home for Astrid Frisch-Jordán, the operations manager for Ecotours de Mexico and a professional whale watcher. Concerned townspeople were soon calling her about the trapped animal.

“The first day, we were like: ‘Oh, that’s very bad, but we cannot attend, we are not experts’,” she recalls.

As the hours ticked by, the community’s urge to act grew. “By the second day, we said: ‘Well, we have to do whatever we can’. And then [on] the third day, we went out [to] sea with just garden tools and our knowledge about whales.”

So began seven dangerous hours of her and several other like-minded locals attempting to cut the animal free with equipment designed for trimming plants. Meanwhile, other whales were trying to intimidate them into leaving.

“It was quite dangerous. But the whale was fully released and we were all okay,” says Frisch-Jordán, who is also the head researcher for an NGO called Ecology and Conservation of Whales (Ecobac). “It changed my life completely.”

The event led to the formation of the Mexican Whale Disentanglement Network (Raben), which this year celebrates 20 years of operation and the successful disentanglement of 66 whales from gillnets, lobster pots and other fishing gear.

From its early days in Banderas Bay, Raben has grown to encompass 15 teams and 180 members. Its growth has coincided with a surge in reports of tangled whales, from less than 10 a year, to 37 by 2021; Frisch-Jordán co-authored a paper published in February that details this rise. According to experts consulted by Dialogue Earth, the surge parallels a global increase. This has likely been driven by an outreach effort encouraging people to report, an increase in entanglements as fishers expand their activities, and the recovery of North Pacific whale populations after the end of industrial hunting.

Freeing the bound

Being tangled in a net or other fishing gear is a horrible experience for marine mammals. Held below the surface, smaller animals can drown, and while larger creatures may be able to swim away, injury is common. Ropes can cut into flesh and slow whales down or force their bodies into awkward positions that inhibit feeding.

Whales are hugely powerful and can drag fishing gear that would be impossible for humans to even lift – one whale attended by a Raben team off Mexico’s coast was tangled in a cod pot from Dutch Harbor in Alaska weighing over 200kg, Frisch-Jordán’s paper notes. The whale may have dragged the load for more than 4,000 nautical miles.

Freeing whales from entanglements is not easy. Typically, teams approach in small boats and try to attach their own line to whatever fishing gear is entangling the animal. If this is successful, buoys are attached to the line, which slow the whale down and keep it at the surface, allowing crucial time to try and cut away the entangled gear with special knives.

The risk for would-be rescuers is becoming entangled in the very fishing gear they are trying to cut loose. Members of disentanglement teams have been dragged under the water and died in such cases; some rescuers have also died from the impact of marine animals hitting them.

“Training people to do this is an enormous responsibility,” says Scott Landry, who directs the Marine Animal Entanglement Response programme at the Center for Coastal Studies in the US. “We live in fear that people are going to be injured doing this work.

“These are large animals. These are fast-moving, messy operations, and we’re dealing with an animal that has no idea we are trying to help them,” adds Landry, who is also a member of the International Whaling Commission (IWC)’s Expert Advisory Panel on Entanglement Response. “I would say they are very unpredictable – and you’re getting them at the worst moment of their lives.”

The techniques used by Landry, Frisch-Jordán and others around the world have their roots in whaling, mankind’s rather less friendly interaction with the world’s largest mammals. Whalers would harpoon them and attach barrels to keep the animals from disappearing below the waves: this history has simultaneously led to today’s dangerously low populations of some species, and provided disentanglers with the tools to help. 

The right whale problem

In the 18th and 19th centuries, North Atlantic right whales were savagely hunted. The whales’ name comes from the notion that these animals – which can exceed 15 metres in length and 60 tonnes in weight – were the “right” ones to hunt, as they were slow-moving and would float once dead.

The pre-whaling population, estimated at 21,000, was harpooned down to a few hundred by the end of the 1800s.

After growing steadily from less than 300 in the early 1990s to number nearly 500 at the start of the 2010s, the North Atlantic right whale population has now contracted to approximately 350. The chief cause is people: the whales are most commonly struck by ships plying the eastern seaboard of the US, or tangled in Atlantic fishing gear.

Researchers who have studied scars on these animals believe over 80% of North Atlantic right whales have been entangled at least once.

“Any threat to a right whale that will increase its mortality risk, or increase ill health from sub-lethal entanglement, will directly affect the chances of the species going extinct,” says Michael Moore, who directs the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Marine Mammal Center in the US.

Moore cites estimates that around 70 reproducing females are left.

Becoming trapped in fishing gear can so sicken whales that they are no longer able to reproduce. Some entangled right whales become so emaciated that they sink rather than float when dead; this is normally only seen in exhausted females after carrying young and giving birth. “Essentially they are dead whales swimming,” says Moore.

Taking techniques around the world

North Atlantic right whales are not the only marine mammals on the brink.

David Mattila, who coordinates the IWC’s expert panel and the Global Whale Entanglement Response Network, is also concerned about the impacts of entanglement on Arabian Sea humpback whales, Chilean right whales and Sea of Okhotsk bowhead whales. Entanglement might also harm the western grey whale, but the animal is so rare Mattila cannot be sure it still exists.

“These are populations of large whales that are very critically endangered, and they are exposed to entanglement,” Mattila tells Dialogue Earth. He adds that these are populations for which the death of even one whale due to entanglement could potentially be a major conservation issue.

Mattila was involved in the development of professional disentanglement efforts when they began in the 1980s. This year, he celebrates the 40th anniversary of his first rescue – a female humpback trapped in a gill net near Provincetown, north-western US.

“Now we know, basically, it happens anywhere in the world you have whales and man-made rope or net in the water,” says Mattila.

Growing concerns and rising reports of entanglements triggered the IWC to convene a special meeting on the topic in 2010, which recommended capacity-building for rescues around the world, alongside prevention. Mattila estimates that, to date, around 1,300 people from 36 countries have been trained by this IWC initiative.

Rope: A problem for fishers, and for humanity

For every whale reported to a rescue network, many more are entangled and die unseen. The real solution, say those involved, should be preventing whales from encountering rope in the first place.

Modern fishing gear ropes are made of various forms of plastic, and manufacturing changes in the 1990s significantly increased their strength. Using weaker rope – either by cutting some strands or manufacturing weaker rope in the first place – has been suggested as a way of saving whales, as has closing areas where whales might come into contact with boats, such as shipping lanes and fishing areas.

Some fishers are also experimenting with marine-mammal-friendly, rope-free systems. For example, typical lobster fishing entails a lobster pot on the sea floor, permanently connected by a rope to a marker buoy at the surface. Rope-free systems use sunk gear with no permanent rope: instead, a lobster catch triggers the pot to release a float, which rises to the surface and signals the gear is ready for retrieval.

However, these solutions all stand to increase the price paid by consumers. To date, society has not been willing to stomach that price, says Moore.

Current industrial fishing methods are predominantly designed to prioritise the catch. Until this paradigm shifts, teams like Frisch-Jordán’s will continue receiving calls about whales entangled in the vast array of equipment that fishers have created to extract food from the seas.

Sometimes, if it is too dark, too dangerous, or a whale is too injured, disentanglement teams cannot help. “The hardest part is when we cannot rescue the whale – and that, of course, happens a lot,” says Frisch-Jordán.

“But when you have a strong whale in perfect shape, and you just set it free, that for me is magical.”

To support national guidelines, experts say adaptation measures must be tailored to local conditions, and basic research enhanced. 

By Xia Zhijian, April 8, 2024

As climate change brings warmer, more acidic waters to China, its offshore fish stocks are coming under pressure.

A number of fish populations – including the large yellow croaker, sea bream and sandlance – are at risk, according to a study by researchers based in the US and China, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Ocean warming has been more pronounced in China’s offshore waters than almost anywhere else. Winter surface temperatures in the Bohai, Yellow and East China seas, off the country’s eastern seaboard, rose by nearly 2C from 1958 to 2014 – well above the global average. And with concentrations of atmospheric CO2 rising, more of the gas is absorbed into the ocean, resulting in acidification of surface water. The trend is particularly evident in the coastal waters of southern Jiangsu, the Yangtze estuary and Hangzhou Bay.

Rapid changes in the marine environment are already threatening species most sensitive to such changes.

The impact of climate change on China’s fisheries is alarming scientists, who say that plenty of research gaps on the issue still need addressing. Aside from the need for a high-level programme to meet the challenge at a national level, coastal regions will have to come up with corresponding management approaches that suit their circumstances.

Limited impact for now

As the world’s largest fishing country, China’s marine catch for 2020 stood at 11.8 million tonnes, with 2.3 million coming from distant waters, according to a 2022 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. However, the same year, its inland fisheries yield slipped to second in the world – behind India – due to the Yangtze fishing ban, the report stated.

The marine catch was significantly lower than the yearly average of 13.24 million tonnes during the 2010s, the report found. The underlying reason for this was the stress on coastal marine animal stocks caused by decades of overfishing.

In an effort to save the industry from collapse, the government has introduced a series of restrictions in recent years, including fishing moratoriums. However, the effects of climate change, notably warmer and more acidic seas, are piling yet more pressure on the marine ecosystem and fisheries sector.

By analysing the impact of climate-induced seawater changes on 67 species of marine animals, the PNAS study identified some key characteristics of climate-vulnerable species. These include: sensitivity to ocean acidification; subjection to overfishing; tolerance of a narrower range of temperatures; and limited migratory capacity as juveniles.

The 67 animals were split into 28 categories on various taxonomic levels (order, family, genus). Positively, the results showed that populations from only six of these categories are currently exposed to a high level of climatic risk, and that recovery potential is medium or high for those in 21 of the categories. It seems the overall impact of climate change on China’s fisheries at this stage is still fairly limited.

Impact varies according to animal type

The study also found that, interestingly, species most able to withstand stress from overfishing are also the most adaptable to climate change. They generally have a high tolerance for temperature change, a broad diet, strong reproductivity and a positive capacity for migration, making them more resilient and able to recover from population decline.

By the same token, less adaptable species are more vulnerable. The large yellow croaker, for example, is especially sensitive to ocean acidification, has a very low tolerance for environmental change, and reproduces relatively slowly.

Overexploitation of the species, which was once distributed throughout the coastal seas of eastern China, has caused wild populations to decline significantly. For Professor Tian Yongjun from the Ocean University of China’s College of Fisheries, the real impact of climate change on large yellow croaker may be even more complex, and is possibly amplifying the effects of overfishing.

As Tian tells China Dialogue Ocean: “A certain level of sea-water temperature rise would actually favour the large yellow croaker, but we haven’t seen any significant increase in wild populations of the fish in recent years. We have studied this, but have yet to come up with a definitive explanation.”

It’s a rather different story for the small yellow croaker, however. Most fish in the temperate waters of eastern China are classified as warm water species (meaning they can live in waters 10C and over), and this includes both the small and large yellow croaker.

Stocks of small yellow croaker have surged in response to warming waters, Tian notes. One possible factor is that the large yellow croaker “has relatively few spawning grounds, unlike the small yellow croaker, and population recovery could suffer once a spawning ground has been wrecked,” he says.

Another factor, he suggests, is that because the large yellow croaker has a relatively long lifespan, “overfishing in the past may have altered the population’s age composition and reproductivity, making recovery difficult.” What’s clear from comparing the situation of large and small yellow croakers is that the effects of climate change on fish populations are complex and involve a great deal of uncertainty.

Nevertheless, China needs to be alert to the risks that climate change brings, especially in how it significantly alters the patterns of fisheries in Chinese waters. A 2022 study by Tian’s team suggests that for 20% of fishery species in China’s seas, a quarter of their habitats are no longer suitable due to rising sea temperatures. Moreover, the situation is projected to worsen in future scenarios, with a quarter of habitats becoming unsuitable for nearly 50% of the species by the 2050s.

Measures tailored to local conditions

China’s policymakers are, to an extent, already aware of the challenges that climate change brings to the fishing industry. The National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 acknowledges the need to strengthen the conservation and restoration of coastal ecosystems. It calls explicitly for maintaining a stable and strictly enforced system of summer fishing moratoriums, a cap for total marine catch, and promoting the sustainable use of such fishery resources.

The PNAS study highlights that the climatic challenges for China’s fisheries differ between regions, and local conditions demand different adaptation policies.

Around the Bohai and Yellow seas, for example, where catching some types of fish presents high risks to the local marine ecosystem, and where the adaptation capability of the local fishing sector is weak, the study found that resilience would be boosted by diversifying into other seafood products. Increased investment in climate-related research and forecasting would also help, along with greater stakeholder involvement in decision-making within both fisheries and other sectors, the authors stated.

In the East China Sea area, overreliance on fisheries can mean local communities are more susceptible to climate change impacts, despite the sector’s relatively robust capacity to adapt. The key, they noted, is to create opportunities for alternative employment.

The study also highlights how crucial it has proven in other countries to enable fishers and other stakeholders to have a role in governance, and to develop information-sharing mechanisms for the climate-adapted management of fisheries. Such approaches, which have yet to be factored in for fishery and marine-related policy at the regional level in China, need to form part of the next phase of the adaptation effort for Chinese fisheries, the authors wrote.

Tian believes that, before a specific action plan can be developed, gaps in the basic research on China’s fisheries – such as the traits and behaviour of different species – need to be addressed first, and that broadly, fisheries management needs to be backed by scientific research.

“Even with the fishing moratorium system and proposed restrictions on catches, there is the basic problem that we’re still not certain where the spawning grounds of the ‘big four’ families of fish are,” he says, referring to the large and small yellow croakers, hairtail and cuttlefish.

“The life cycle characteristics and concomitant changes for many of the fish are not clear either,” he adds. “That being the case, how do you ascertain the impact of climate change on them?”

As WTO talks to limit these subsidies falter, another route could reap environmental and human benefits, write Louise Teh and Rashid Sumaila. 

By Louise Teh, Rashid Sumaila, April 9, 2024

Each year, governments around the world give billions of dollars to their fishing sectors. These public funds – around USD 35.4 billion annually, according to 2018 estimates – pay for everything from building ports to research and development.

Some subsidies can be beneficial, for example by promoting conservation. Others are classified as harmful because they promote overcapacity (too many vessels chasing the same fish) and overfishing. Subsidising fuel for long-distance fishing, for example, supports excessive fishing that overexploits both fish populations and fuel, the latter leading to more greenhouse gas emissions. Worryingly, harmful subsidies make up the bulk of fisheries subsidies.

Fishery subsidies currently perpetuate social injustice too. Over 90% of the world’s fishers work in the small-scale fishing sector, predominantly in developing countries where average income is below the World Bank’s extreme poverty threshold, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tuvalu. However, the majority of subsidies go to large, industrial fisheries – around 80% according to the most recent estimates.

This injustice is compounded by the fact that while harmful subsidies mainly originate from nations that score highly on the Human Development Index, in other words rich countries, they have a disproportionate impact on low or very-low HDI nations.

When unsustainable practices are carried out by industrial fleets, the sheer scale of the resulting damage depletes the fish populations that are crucial to coastal, small-scale fisheries. Therefore, subsidising industrial fleets can contribute to harming marine ecosystems, human livelihoods, food security and the socioeconomic wellbeing of coastal fishing communities.

These low-HDI nations already tend to have low management capacity and a larger number of vulnerable fish populations, and may also face pressure from the distant-water fleets of a handful of rich governments.

Progress and setbacks at international level

Despite widespread recognition that harmful fisheries subsidies must be removed to ensure sustainable fisheries, efforts to counter this situation are stalling. The most recent international negotiations on such subsidies, held in February 2024 under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), were a major disappointment.

In 2022, WTO members took the historic step of agreeing to prohibit subsidies that facilitate illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, the exploitation of overfished populations, and fishing on the high seas. By contrast, this year’s negotiations failed to produce a second set of broader rules to ban subsidies that contribute more generally to overcapacity and overfishing.

In addition to this setback, the 2022 agreement has only been ratified by 71 WTO members as of March 2024; to come into force, it requires 110. So, many governments continue to subsidise the overexploitation of our oceans and the injustices this produces.

A fairer way forward

Our group at the University of British Columbia has been studying both the amount and the effects of different types of fisheries subsidies since the early 2000s. Recently, we looked at the 30 least developed coastal countries and asked: how much current poverty among fishers could be eliminated by redirecting harmful subsidies?

We found that the average income of fishers in these 30 countries fell far below the World Bank’s extreme poverty benchmark of USD 1.90 per person per day. Put simply, the average fisher does not have enough money to support their basic living needs. This risks the wellbeing of their household and community.

The fisheries world finds itself in a situation where governments are subsidising environmentally damaging fishing practices, while coastal fishing communities are living in abject poverty: the latter is bearing the brunt of resource overexploitation.

Clearly, governments are not putting the public’s money in the right place. Would it not make sense if, instead of funding overfishing, governments put those same funds towards alleviating fishers’ poverty?

Our work shows it would cost approximately USD 2.65 billion per year to eliminate extreme poverty among fishers in the world’s 30 least-developed coastal nations. Together, these 30 countries provided USD 850 million in harmful fisheries subsidies in 2018. But in 11 of these countries, the amount spent on harmful fisheries subsidies would also be enough to lift their fishers out of extreme poverty. This implies these nations hold in their own hands the means to begin mitigating this situation.

The right thing to do

Redirecting harmful fisheries subsidies towards alleviating poverty in coastal fishing communities is worth considering because it could achieve a double benefit: to both biodiversity and human society. It could even be a way to bypass the WTO’s stalled negotiations; and no one country would be at a disadvantage, because each would simply be redirecting state subsidies.

In terms of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, such redirections would contribute directly to several: goal 14.6, the (overdue) target of eliminating many harmful fisheries subsidies by 2020; goal 1, zero poverty; and goal 2, zero hunger.

Many details need to be ironed out before this change could be implemented. What mechanism could be used to transfer money, and who would be eligible to receive it, are just two of the critical questions.

Nonetheless, there are numerous pre-existing national and international social assistance programmes that could serve as a model. The argument for a basic income, which centres on the same principle of providing a minimum level of income to a subset of a country’s total population, has gained momentum in recent years – especially since the Covid-19 pandemic began. For instance, Spain and Togo provided a minimum income level to poor and vulnerable people in response to pandemic-induced economic turmoil.

Ending harmful subsidies could do more than ending the damage of unsustainable fishing practices. It could also lift fishers out of extreme poverty and bring about social, human health and environmental gains.

Louise Teh

Solar farms in the ocean could generate clean energy on a vast scale, but there are difficult waters to navigate first. 

By You Xiaoying, April 18, 2024

China is increasingly seeking to put solar panels on the seas off its coastline, with some state-run companies experimenting as far offshore as 30 kilometres.

A global leader in renewable energy, China has already been looking to the ocean to meet its future power via wind, waves and tides.

But ambitious plans for large solar installations face problems ranging from rough seas to a regulatory vacuum, experts have told Dialogue Earth.

The country’s strong supply chains could give it a leg up in tackling hurdles to ocean solar power. It could spearhead a new sector that harnesses the vast surface of the world’s coastal and offshore waters to generate clean energy, experts say.

An opportunity for coastal regions

Ocean-based solar power is relatively new, with the first deployments dating back less than a decade.

Some of the earliest adopters were Norwegian fish farms. They used solar instead of diesel to power their barges, says Børge Bjørneklett, a Norwegian entrepreneur who invented a floating system in 2016.

His design was inspired by the structure of some fish farms. Rows of solar panels are laid on top of large membranes which float on water and are anchored to the sea floor.

“If it [were] possible to deploy solar farms on near-shore ocean, it would represent almost limitless surface,” says Bjørneklett, who founded the floating solar company Ocean Sun in 2016 and was its CEO until recently.

Traditional solar farms occupy a lot of land. This can be difficult to find close to big cities, and in the countryside it may be needed for agriculture and nature.

Putting solar power “closer to the public” in cities along coasts or by big lakes is the “best application for solar energy”, says Bjørneklett, who believes most solar farms will be situated on water in future.

“The largest interest for floating solar comes from Southeast Asia, China and India – where you have high population density and large solar farms [on land] are in competition with agriculture or urbanisation,” he adds.

Dipping a toe in ocean solar

Last December, China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) started building an ocean-based solar farm with a capacity of 400 megawatts (MW) in Laizhou Bay off east China’s Shandong province.

The project will see solar panels bolted to posts attached to the bottom of the Bohai Sea in waters between 8.5 and 11 metres deep, according to a press release from CGN. Once complete, the plant is expected to generate 690 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of power annually, the company said.

The sector is still nascent in China though. “Few ocean-based solar power projects have been installed and their capacities are not big,” Xu Honghua, director of Beijing-based thinktank the Chinese Renewable Energy System Association (CRESA), tells Dialogue Earth. “In general, it is still at an experimental phase.”

China added 217 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity last year, more than the United States has in its history, according to BloombergNEF.

Only around 3 GW of this was ocean-based, according to estimates by Zhou, a manager at a consulting firm focused on renewable power projects, who asked to be cited by his family name only. But interest is rising.

At present, most of China’s large solar farms are situated in the less-populated north-west of the country. The electricity they generate needs to be transmitted long distances to the big coastal cities of the east and south-east where it is needed. Building ocean-based solar could potentially solve this headache by locating plants close to their end users, reducing costs.

“This also means that provinces that need a lot of electricity would be able to use the natural resources on their doorstep,” says Zhou.

Policy U-turn or plan for growth?

In 2018, some 90% of China’s top 500 energy companies were state-owned, largely because of the importance of the energy industry to the country, an analysis by industry outlet in-en.com found.

Most ocean-based solar developers in China are state-owned companies, some of which are directly supervised by the central government, Xu says. “This is a new sector with large-scale projects, promising economies of scale and great market potential,” Xu adds.

According to Zhou, the companies that have invested the most in ocean solar are those that had acted slowly in other new-energy sectors – such as China National Nuclear Corporation, China Three Gorges Renewables and CGN. “They were a little conservative in investing in renewables previously … so they want to act more vigorously in making plans in upcoming markets,” he says.

But two documents released by the Ministry of Natural Resources in the past few months have sparked discussions over the sector’s future.

In November, the ministry instructed all regional marine authorities to establish a “multi-layer” administrative mechanism to help approve sea area use – not only for solar projects but in general. Just two months later, the ministry’s Department of Sea Area and Island Management ordered all their regional branches to pause the processing of sea-usage applications from ocean-based solar projects, according to PV Time, an industry outlet.

Experts told Dialogue Earth the suspension does not mean that China will not develop ocean-based solar. They believe the central government is trying to lay the groundwork for large-scale projects, especially at the policy level, to ensure their smooth development in the future.

Xu says ocean-based solar “is the trend”. Many government departments and other parties need to coordinate to develop it, he points out. Technical aspects still need research, while proper standards will help avoid some of the pitfalls of past solar projects and prevent “unnecessary losses caused by blind development”.

“For example, in the past, some onshore solar plants were allowed to be built in protected areas, river channels or flood-relief areas without proper permitting procedures or when the industry rules were unclear,” he notes. “They had to be demolished later.”

Zhou agrees that the authority is taking a “cautious” approach to avoid repeating some of the mistakes made early on with onshore solar power. He cites the sun-baked north-western province of Gansu as a cautionary tale.

In the early 2010s, a large number of onshore solar farms were built in Gansu after the central government promoted the development of renewable energy. Rapid growth led to serious headaches when power grids were unable to take in the volume of power generated by the plants, as state-run China Energy News reported in 2015. The result was huge curtailment – or wastage – of excess power.

“There are too many examples in China where companies rushed into one sector at the same time, saturating the market quickly and creating issues,” says Zhou.

The Ministry of Natural Resources seems to want to “utilise resources in a more refined and scientific way,” he adds. “It might also want to control the size of projects to ensure the sector grows steadily.”

Shandong spearheads offshore solar

Although regulations are still being ironed out, China’s central government has encouraged provinces and state-run energy firms to step up research and development.

In a notice released last September, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said it supported the development of pilot projects “in developed sea areas such as salt fields”, meaning special areas used for harvesting sea salt, and highlighted the need to prioritise assessing ecological and environmental impacts.  

Some provinces had pounced on the emerging sector as early as 2021.

Ocean-based solar power plays a role in both Jiangsu and Zhejiang’s renewable development plans. The former is planning to build “energy islands” and support the integration of offshore wind, solar and fish farming all in the same patch of water.

Shandong – an industrial, manufacturing and agricultural hub – might be the most ambitious of all. Facing the Yellow Sea to the east and the Bohai Sea to the north, the province has more than 3,000 kilometres of coastline, one-sixth of China’s total.

In 2022, its provincial energy administration set detailed targets that include starting to build 13 GW of solar power capacity fixed to the seabed with posts, and trying to start building 2 GW of floating solar by 2025. By that year, it intends to connect to the grid 11 GW of the former and 1 GW of the latter. 

It also announced subsidies for companies that start building floating ocean solar projects between 2023 and 2025. (The central government has ceased giving out financial incentives to solar projects.)

Hu Bo, head of the Shandong Energy Administration, said in February: “It has been proven that ocean-based solar has great developmental potential and high cost-effectiveness, and is eco-friendly, too.”

Some projects are taking solar power even further out to sea. In 2022, the Shandong branch of the State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) employed Ocean Sun’s technology to build a 500-kilowatt experimental floating solar farm far from the coastal sites favoured by other projects. Situated more than 30 kilometres off the coast of Haiyang, in waters about 30 metres deep, the experiment was designed to test the feasibility of building a 20 MW floating solar project there in the future.

A total of 770 solar panels were laid on top of two circular floating platforms, each 53 metres across, as part of a project that also featured a 300 MW wind farm.

Bjørneklett, the founder of Ocean Sun, describes the Haiyang project as “fantastic” and “exciting”. But he acknowledges its many challenges, such as ocean waves that could be as high as 10 metres.

“This is a very bold and experimental activity,” he adds. “You learn a lot, of course, in that process.”

Footage circulating on the Chinese internet last year purported to show that the membrane and solar panels of one of the project’s platforms had gone missing. An industry expert told Shanghai-based outlet Yicai that the footage had been filmed at the Haiyang project sometime in 2022 and that the missing components had likely sunk in rough seas.

Ocean Sun told Dialogue Earth in March that the Shandong project is a part of the company’s ongoing cooperation on research and development with SPIC, and it is not in a position to comment on the footage.

Hopes and challenges for ocean-based solar

Building floating ocean solar farm is “much more challenging” than onshore construction and once built they face far tougher conditions, including saltwater that corrodes electronics and battering from waves and wind, Bjørneklett points out.

The Norwegian thinks completely offshore floating solar “will probably not happen right away” because it can “easily become too expensive”. A more promising option is to build in semi-sheltered waters, he adds.

Another hurdle is a shortage of experience in the development, design, installation and operation of such projects. Xu, of CRESA, says that China needs to continue accumulating experience and enhance its ability to come up with different designs for different natural conditions and power demands.

In terms of non-technical challenges, the lack of industry regulations is viewed as a roadblock. Standards and policies will need to be established for various aspects, Xu notes, including sea-usage permitting, connection to power grids, environmental assessments and project approval.

Coordination between government agencies will also be crucial.

Trade body the China Photovoltaic Industry Association has called for improved standards and a certification system for the sector.

In a report on the status and challenges of ocean-based solar power in China, it said energy, maritime, natural resources, power grid and other relevant authorities should join forces to formulate a template for the overall approval process of marine energy projects and guide companies to develop them.

China’s advanced manufacturing capabilities can give it a boost. Major Chinese solar power manufacturers are already working in the coastal and offshore areas: Sungrow set up a subsidiary for developing floating-solar businesses as early as 2016; Jinko Solar has created double-sided solar panels that can generate power from light reflected off the ocean surface; and JA Solar has unveiled two types of marine solar panels – one for projects fixed to the seabed with posts, and another for those that float.

“China has the largest and most complete industry chain for onshore solar. This can provide it with a large volume of technological experiences and reserves,” Zhou says.

He believes the country is “perfectly capable of” taking its onshore experience out to sea step by step.