to do this clean up. and with thousands of panels, that s potentially a lot of clean up. but that begs another question. with all these panels sat on a concrete platform, what s keeping the platform afloat? this is it? there you go. it s pretty mind blowing to think that this can support hundreds of tons of concrete and solar panels. that s right. it doesn t seem like it, but it works! it s amazing. these floating systems, they will have to last around about 20 years, more or less. you have a lot of mechanical stress on the platform. so essentially what we tried to do is to design a compound that can have the best of both worlds, so recycled polyethylene and cork. but despite their advantages, it s estimated that currently less than i% of the world s solar installations are floating. this is in part due to cost and being able to position panels at an optimum angle to maximise their output.
about on that solar array in the fjord. it was only like a few millimetres thick under your feet, wasn t it? yeah, it was all about the material. it had to be light enough that it could do the job, whilst also being strong enough to be able to withstand any weather conditions. well, fortunately, today s one is much sturdier. and just to prove that you can build little islands of nature anywhere you want, we re currently at the camley street nature park here in the very heart of london. and now paul carter is taking the next step in floating solar farms. he s been to portugal to see the country s latest innovation. paul: over the past two years, energy prices have soared to record levels, leading to some countries increasing their efforts to harness the potential of their available renewable power sources. blessed with its sunny climate, portugal is perfectly placed to accelerate its shift to solar. although you may not have seen a solar farm like this before. i m on the alqueva reservo
a pretty sleek headset. it does away with the jumble of cables and post processing box that made the original playstation vr such a pain to set up and live with. instead, it has just one cable which connects to the playstation v console via a usb c. that is it. thanks to the addition of four cameras on the outside of the headset, the player can see the space around them if they need to and the device doesn t need the same sort of extravagant webcam and coloured light set up that was the hallmark of the original. it comes with a set of headphones, although you can plug your own headphones into it if you want to. and then we have the two dedicated wireless controllers. they pretty much mimic the kind of features that you find on a normal playstation controller. so you ve got your thumbsticks here, triggers. to put the headset on, you have this button on the back, so it s adjustable, and then this little dial here allows you to get a perfect fit. inside it sports a 4k oled display, with 1
the interceptor original, which is this solar powered autonomous robot, essentially, that has these conveyor belts to automatically scoop out the trash. distribute it in dumpsters and then when it s full, you can empty it and essentially keep cleaning. we ve developed these ai powered cameras. and what we do is we attach these to bridges, and what it does is it automatically scans the amount of plastic that s flowing through a river. then we actually have a very similar technology that we use on the oceans, where we attach cameras to the bows of ships, which allows us to automatically scan the surface of the ocean. so far, with our ocean clean up system in the great pacific garbage patch, with our fleet of interceptors and we have collected more than two million kilos of trash, which on one hand is quite satisfying. on the other hand, of course,
that s right. it doesn t seem like it, but it works! it s amazing. these floating systems, they will have to last around about 20 years, more or less. you have a lot of mechanical stress on the platform. so essentially what we tried to do is to design a compound that can have the best of both worlds, so recycled polyethylene and cork. but despite their advantages, it s estimated that currently less than i% of the world s solar installations are floating. this is in part due to cost and being able to position panels at an optimum angle to maximise their output. but already, new tech is being developed that allows a solar farm, like this one in the netherlands, to track the sun throughout the day, rather like a sunflower does. it s claimed that sun tracking installations could increase energy production by a third, and so the future looks bright for solar, where every country, landlocked or not, can become its own energy island.