Floating panels could help power remote mining

Remote mining operations in places such as the Ring of Fire in Ontario's far north could one day rely on solar technology developed in Sudbury to power part of their operations.

Dean Millar is a researcher at MIRARCO, a mining innovation centre at Laurentian University.

He is working to develop a system of floating solar panels that could sit on tailings ponds

Millar has placed a small version of the floating system on a pond in front of Laurentian's Living With Lakes Centre.

"Many people have examples of [solar panels] in their homes, on their roofs, and so on," he said.

"But what makes this one different is that instead of being mounted on a roof, the photovoltaic panels float on the surface of a water body."

If deployed on a large scale, Millar said the system could reduce the cost of powering a remote mining operation by about 10 per cent.

Help manage tailings

Millar said the floating solar panels could generate power while solving another problem: keeping the wind from disturbing tailings in a water body.

"If you decouple the wind, or keep the wind away from the surface of that water body, then the water becomes less turbulent and the suspended particles settle much more quickly," he said.

One challenge researchers are still trying to overcome is how to keep the surface of the panels clean and able to soak in the sun when the pond is still and water doesn't splash over them, Millar said.

The floating panels also can't be rotated to maximize their exposure to the sun, but they run more efficiently because they are naturally cooled by the water, Millar said.