US Army deploys its first floating solar array
I wonder if this could have a military purpose as well, as in whether this could be used in a combat area. Any of the other types of electrical power generation systems are very "centralized", as in there is only a few points where just a few hundred kg of hexagon delivered by a precision missile that slips past air defense would easily terminate the power production.<p>On the other hand, a mesh of solar panels deployed over a larger body of water is a pretty difficult target to destroy. Imagine that it is floating over a 1km by 1km (or even 1 mile by 1 mile) area - what are you going to use against it? Unguided artillery? Would take a huge amount of shells, even though they're cheap it's probably infeasible. The same with unguided air-dropped bombs. Guided munition? Even worse than the unguided stuff, no high value targets to hit. The only way to defeat such a meshed power plant would be a small nuclear bomb.<p>(the above assumes that there's no single energy collection point, of course, otherwise that place would be targetted)<p>The other upside is that there is no need to supply oil, which is currently the preferred way of delivering energy to the combat area. The downside is the time it would take to deploy such a mesh, a diesel generator works pretty much instantly.