TANGIER: Sun-baked Morocco, grappling with its worst drought in decades, has launched a pilot project aimed at slowing water evaporation while simultaneously generating green energy using floating solar panels.

At a major reservoir near the northern city of Tangier, thousands of so-called “floatovoltaic” panels protect the water’s surface from the blazing sun and absorb its light to generate electricity.

Authorities plan to power the neighbouring Tanger Med port complex with the resulting energy, and if it proves a success, the technology could have far wider implications for the North African kingdom. According to official figures, Morocco’s water reserves lost the equivalent of more than 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day to evaporation between October 2022 and Sept 2023. Over that same period, temperatures averaged 1.8C higher than normal, meaning water evaporated at a higher rate.

Alongside other factors like declining rainfall, this has reduced reservoirs nationwide to about one-third of their capacity. Water ministry official Yassine Wahbi said the Tangier reservoir loses around 3,000 cubic metres a day to evaporation, but that figure more than doubles in the hot summer months.

The floating photovoltaic panels can help cut evaporation by about 30 percent, he said. The water ministry has said the floating panels represent “an important gain in a context of increasingly scarce water resources”, even if the evaporation they stop is, for now, relatively marginal.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2025