Responsible mining: Carmen Copper floating solar project in Philippines

Intent on lowering its carbon footprint, Carmen Copper Corp.’s turning some 3 hectares — roughly 7 acres — of its Malubog Reservoir into a floating solar farm did more than just set precedent with the first megawatt-scale floating photovoltaic (PV) plant for the mining company and the Philippines.  

The project — designed and carried out by Black & Veatch — embodied something simply cool. 

'Floating PV': powering a resilient renewable future

Built to contribute to Carmen Copper’s power demand – the 4.996- megawatt (MW) self-generating facility is made up of 8,540 PV modules and floaters on the reservoir near Toledo City in Cebu province. The project is designed to scale up to 50 MWs, with the potential to fully power Carmen Copper’s operations with renewable energy. 

The first-of-a-kind facility is worth beholding, both for its breadth and for the innovation unseen beneath the surface.  

Some 360 miles south of Manila, the project – executed by Black & Veatch,  a global leader in energy solutions — includes a prefabricated substation and a six-kilometer overhead distribution line linked to Carmen Copper’s existing 34.5-kilovolt (kV) substation.  

Using solar panels fixed at a constant tilt angle, the power from the sun will prove valuable during peak energy hours, paring dependence on fossil fuels while underscoring the company’s quest to meet environmental compliance standards and achieve its own goals to be more energy responsible. 

Taken together, the floating photovoltaic project — “floatovoltaics,” for short — embodies Carmen Copper’s advances in pursuing a greener, cleaner operational future and doing the right thing in a region waging an energy transition favoring renewables. It’s a striking example of a sustainable solution to land constraints, a leadership benchmark illustrating the ability of Black & Veatch to marshal its deep know-how to build such a floating feat, creating a rooftop-like solar plant on water.  

From concept to completion, the project took roughly 15 months and for now will cover at least one-tenth of Carmen Copper’s power needs, meeting government mandates involving renewable energy for a mining company. There’s capacity for more and perhaps battery storage. 

Welcome to the collaborative convergence of engineering, environmental science and renewable energy innovation, executing a bolder vision of tomorrow’s energy by harnessing the power of the sun while effortlessly afloat.  

Floating solar in the Philippines: rising tide of resilience 

Carmen Copper’s foray into floating solar reflects the Philippines’ ongoing growth in renewable energy capacity and the country’s ambitions to actively develop floating solar power, given its many large inland lakes suitable for such development.  

It's in that context that Carmen Copper in September 2022 called on Black & Veatch to develop a power system impact report, then a front-end engineering and design (FEED) analysis to better understand the what it takes to move the project into the EPC stage. The process involved navigating the natural questions: How much will it cost to build and operate? How will that be paid for? Will it be truly reliable?  

Ultimately, the companies’ cultures — shared emphasis on being stewards of the environment, meeting compliance and regulatory requirements, and being socially conscious — meshed. Black & Veatch was hired as the topline EPC contractor in December 2023 and went to work the following spring. 

Advantages of floatovoltaics

Preassembled onshore, buoyant platform “floaters” crafted of recycled plastic supported the solar arrays — 28 panels on each section — that were towed four to six segments at a time by rubberized tugboats across the lake and positioned before incrementally being bracketed together. The array then was tied to mooring lines linked to the submerged concrete anchor blocks, positioned using Sonar GPS, and each made under Black & Veatch supervision for quality assurance.  

The advantages of floatovoltaics are abundant. Water surfaces don’t cost as much as land, they’re more compact, and water cools the water and corrosion-resistant panels, giving them greater efficiency than their on-land counterparts. Floating solar is especially useful in areas with limited land availability and even can mitigate water evaporation through the shading the panel flotilla provides. And water levels can be controlled by the reservoir’s dam. 

Along the way, Black & Veatch and Carmen Copper collaborated on ensuring safety during the rigorous construction, ultimately achieving more than 250,000 man-hours without lost time due to injury. With subcontractors and the often-unskilled labor they hired having different levels of understanding of preferred safety protocols, assuring that workers — including many locals — went home unharmed to their families each day was paramount. 

As the region migrates to renewables, what transpired on serene Malubog Reservoir — on time and within budget — offers yet another testament to how the right planning, collaboration, creativity and a bold vision of a transition to a greener energy ecosystem can deliver innovative, reliable power.