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It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no? The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap. Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field. You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.
Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper. The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.
The best reasoning they give is that California has insane permitting requirements, and it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.
Or better yet, invest in pipes.
Canal sized pipes?
I'm pretty sure those are called tunnels
According to AI, that pipe would only need to be 43 Feet in diameter, only 43 feet wide. Pretty sure they have that at Home Depot.
I'm sure it could be done, but it would cost a fortune. My understanding is the canals were built to distribute water to farmers, and conservation/evaporation wasn't really much of a consideration because California had plenty of water back then.
BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.
At least $16 billion for 45 miles. See https://www.deltaconveyanceproject.com/about-the-delta-conve... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Conveyance_Project
And suddenly you can build something else on those pipelines?
Literally in the article.
What's the lifetime of a "cheap shade"? And the cost to renew it over the same lifetime? And the cost of paying for other land?
... likely less than the ~$13/W this cost to install, but that included NRE for three different styles of panel mounting. Standardizing would cut costs significantly.
Yes, I'd like to see the "cheap shade" that could span as far as shown in the pics as well as survive strong gales. It wouldn't be like a cheap shade in your back yard.
There are solutions like this to most of Californias big intractable problems, and they're not done because some California laws and/or regulations make it impossible.
This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...
A lot of things get easier when everyone basically lives in one city, yes.
The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap. Large PV panels make very good sails. The trusses look basically the same as you'd see in a large agricultural barn, horse riding arena, etc. Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.
I would very much like to see a total dollar figure for the example "roof trusses over the canel" structure vs. how many panels it can hold.
It's already true that the ground mounting costs and labor to assemble the ground mount are a huge part of building a large scale PV system.
What empty, bare land?
If its really empty and bare, there is a reason for it and that reason is probably a problem for building and maintaining PV, and otherwise you have to add the loss of the alternative uses of the land to the cost.
Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.
Guess how fast the wind blows across the surfaces. There's a reason why these places currently host massive wind turbine farms.
Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)
The wind and blown sand is something to behold. But large stretches are getting solar panels, yes.
In the context of California, land that is not suitable for agriculture because it can't be irrigated, even though it's flat and somewhat accessible by road. California has plenty of it, go drive around near Twenty Nine Palms and you'll see it...
And the moment you start building large structures on it everyone and their dog is going to show up and NIMBY it.
Spoken like someone who has never been to the mojave. This is the home to the largest wind turbine installation in the country. But again, if the worry is the solar panels acting like sails, probably not a great site given that wind.
And nonetheless, people show up and NIMBY projects in the Mojave desert! https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-06/califor...
Now measure the wind at twenty nine palms
To my eye if you were putting up a few hundred or more of those steel structures, and it didn't require a redesign of the canal retainment around it, it could be built quite economically.
Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.
You know where the wind blows really damn hard in California? Virtually any open field you can imagine putting these otherwise. Mojave for example is damn windy. That is why they currently host massive wind installations there.
I'm well aware of that, thanks. Ground mount PV is still going to be considerably less costly than this. Partly because it's easier to build, partly because it has many competing companies that sell the basic aluminum rail/hot dip galvanized steel mounting pieces, partly because you can use relatively low cost contractors to do work like install its footings and bolt it together.
Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.
I mean sure, but compared to say having that technician in a dingy boat, its more costly in the sense you need a dingy boat. But this doesn't seem insurmountable. Maybe you don't even need a dingy boat. Maybe just a long 2x12 would be fine or some other scaffold platform you can just drag around. There's also something to be said about this solar array being where the land is already being used, and some greenfield solar array going in, well, greenfield areas that might be ecologically more sensitive.
Tell me you've never built a ground or roof mount PV system without coming right out any saying it... Wow. You took a look at the photos in the original URL and think that a person can stand in a small boat and wire up the backside of the panels? I'd love to obtain some of what you're smoking because it must be some incredible stuff.
The UK has covered some water reservoir with floating PV panels.
The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:
might come close.
Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.
My understanding is that "The best reasoning they give" is the entire point. It such a huge issue that it drowns out all of the valid but smaller issues you are pointing out. And, the benefit to the water is just a bonus.
Exactly, that is hundreds of miles over which no NIMBY holds sway. The state can do what they want.
Power lines are made of aluminum and steel.
I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.
Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?
Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?
Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?
"Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon."
In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.
A solar panel is 4 feet or so on the long side. Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. even if it's topped out at 10A thats still 120KW... you need a hefty cable to carry that panel to panel. Which is the core of the point I was making.
Amps determine how hefty a cable needs to be, not volts. Volts mostly determine how thick the insulation needs to be.
14 gauge wire is basically all you need to carry 10A safely for an extended period of time regardless the voltage. It doesn't matter that you are carrying 120KW.
The proof of this is in EV charge cables. Those bad boys can carry up to 350kW. Yet the cables are often thinner than you might expect. How do they do this? It's by using high voltages (around 900V) which cuts back the amps to around 300->400.
Tesla's chargers peak (or used to) around 600V which has required them to have much beefier cables to handle the high current.
I get that. I'm pretty skeptical that 120 KW going through the last panel doesn't cause damage, and in the "multiple miles chained together" (to quote op) many MW going through the panel at the end of the chain doesn't run into some sort of issue in the real world. Even small percentage losses turn into a lot of heat or other issues at that scale.
If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?
It won't! That's the amazing thing about electricity.
While having 12kV going through panels is not safe for many reasons, having 300V at 10-20A is completely normal.
12kV is impractical because these voltages can jump quite far, and you need a lot of insulation for them to be safe.
Anecdotally speaking, I have heard of a massive California solar farm in an undeveloped area that has serious vandalism problems. Junkies will find ways through the fencing at night, strip copper and other materials from panels, and cause thousands in damages and lost energy just to extract enough scrap for a fix.
Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals, so there it is a challenging cost-benefit balance. At least panels in parking lots and other developed spaces have the benefit of witnesses. I'm sure a 20 foot climb up a steel beam over running water is a decent deterrent as well.
And the one thing California absolutely will not do is put these people in jail.
A company nightwatchman making $20/hr would cost about $80k/yr, all in.
One prisoner costs the California taxpayer $125k/yr, all in.
Maybe the company should foot the bill for a security guard instead of asking the taxpayers to subsidize their business.
This implies that vandals only attack one business, instead of being a public nuisance or menace to everyone.
Looks like the vandals will have to move along to somewhere else to score some copper.
Ah yes, breaking news: vandals have cars and commit more than one kind of crime.
Your takeaway is that every solar installation, regardless of size, now has an $80k/year minimum cost associated with its' mere existence because California can't get its' house in order?
Citation needed that this problem is unique to California.
https://wallethub.com/edu/drug-use-by-state/35150
The theft problem seems to be. Texas has marginally higher drug use than California but I’ve never heard of this problem here.
Texas also has open carry.
Google “Texas copper theft” and you’ll no longer be able to claim that. Lots of examples.
24/7 coverage 365 days a year at 20$/h = 175,200$/year.
Your math implies polar winter. Solar would be a bad investment.
You can’t assume behavior is unchanged when you change the situation.
In remote areas if you only guard at night they will go in the day.
You've changed the situation. It's a night problem that needs a night solution.
They’ll get electrocuted during the day.
Why would a company spend their own money when they can have someone else spend their money instead?
I do not consider being a reasonably well adjusted member of society, and enforcing that, to be the responsibility of businesses and do not agree that we are all subsidizing a business’ ability to have nice things without people destroying them.
Brilliant idea! We should just privatize everything! By doing so, we’ll make companies foot the bill for every public service they rely on!
Come to think of it, who needs communally regulated safety services like jails, prisons, and law enforcement? In addition to having a private guard, every company should have their own in-house holding pen and justice system :)
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Grandmaster Flash on “Birth of a Culture” | The New Yorker Radio Hour
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
-Tom O’Donnell
They have been trying to crack down on the people buying the scrap: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...
Meanwhile in Washington:
Better luck next year, I guess.
First hand experience here - worked with a non-profit that has a tiny solar and battery installation for a light display, and we have had constant theft and vandalism problems with it. It's not even easy to get to - those meth-heads had to work to steal the lead acid batteries and copper wire...
Several years ago one of the local youth sports complex was limited to daylight use because the copper would get stolen from the light poles. This was a large complex with many light poles. Within a week of them being fixed, they'd come and steal the new copper. I never did follow up to see what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.
https://youtu.be/PfHu-UJaK0Q?is=bp0HygfjqBJBDpoO
There are large, large stretches of highway near me that’re all but pitch black at night because people have stolen copper from the light poles. It’s only getting worse.
Is this in California? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in Texas.
In a just society the penalties for that behavior would be commiserate with the societal costs. Even if the single act is relatively low cost, the societal-wide implication means no one can reasonably do this at a small scale without losing their investment. Therefore the penalties should be harsh, widely publicized, and extreme
This I believe is part of why forgery is dealt with so harshly, copying a few thousand bucks isn’t a big deal but destroying the integrity of hard currency is.
I always thought the same logic should be applied to corruption by any kind of official. No matter if politician, judge or police officer - their crimes should be punished 10- or even 100-fold because the real damaged is undermining the entire system.
Such a society would pay a whole lot more attention to white-collar financial and environmental crimes than to anything all the motivated junkies in the country could wreak.
Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.
This kind of thing is why Dirty Harry style crime-punishment-porn exists.
Maybe I'm missing context from your locality, but you think the meth heads tried to sell gasoline on the sidewalk, and not that the shadiest shop in town paid some people to drum up business?
Happened right here too: thieves opened up man hole covers in city parks and took the wires. The city now has large boulders right over those man hole covers...
Why can't we aim these meth supervillians at the surveillance cameras then?
they're hitting those too to be fair. In South America its a big problem in communities that are really poor. The components of even CCTV cameras are so valuable that surveillance cameras get taken down almost immediately
I’m willing to bet if we gave them their fix they wouldn’t steal a thing. But because their fix is illegal they have to steal to get their fix.
Seems to me like the root cause is the illegality of the drugs. I hope you never have to deal with substance abuse problems yourself. You won’t like being on the dehumanizing end of the stick that you’re presently poking with.
If you're going to give junkies their fix, are you going to buy my alcohol too? What about my gambling debts? What about my escort bill for my sex addiction? Shy are you differentiating addiction to drugs?
Someone with heavy, habitual alcohol use can still get drunk on $20 of alcohol. Someone with a heavy opiate habit may spend hundreds of dollars a day on drugs just to maintain. A habituated opiate user could also get through the day with $20 worth of drugs if we allowed opiates to be produced and sold like alcohol, but we don't. So the unemployed junkie needs to beg or steal a lot more than the unemployed alcoholic to get their fix. That's why the parent comment highlighted "illegality of the drugs" as the cause.
If you think an alcoholic stops drinking when they get drunk, then it sounds to me like you don't really understand alcoholism
I think you missed the posters point. I just checked prices on a store nearby and for the cheap Vodka you can buy a handle which is ~40 drinks for $12. So basically no matter how extreme for $20 you can buy more alcohol than pretty much any human could consume in a day.
Sex addiction isn't a real thing.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-014-0016-8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
Junkies and meth-heads are a different kind of animal from your average drunk, and the reality of the proposal that you responded to is a simple economic analysis of investing in keeping them placated or paying for the damage they cause. It's far cheaper to prevent rather than react and repair.
If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.
I don't have anything to add, other than my appreciation for this comment. Glad I'm not the only one here that gets it.
No, you misunderstand, which means I didn't communicate it well: The problem is that the drugs are illegal. I would make them legal so they could be purchased from a pharmacy. The problem with junkies stealing to get their fix is that they're already criminals for the addiction and already people without support in society. So straight up stealing copper from wherever isn't really a big deal. You're already a criminal. You're already halfway down that slippery slope.
But there was a world in which junkies existed when the junk wasn't criminal. People had serious addictions, but kept normal lives, because their addiction wasn't criminal. I'm not trying to solve addiction. I'm trying to end the criminality for substance abuse.
And to answer, no, buy your own booze. Cover your own debts, gambling or otherwise. Sex addiction is made up bullshit.
I would love to see more project specs call for aluminum cable. For a given ampacity, it’s lighter, cheaper and more flexible than copper.
The major downsides are that the exposed wire is much less corrosion resistant underground (which is irrelevant) and that you need appropriate lugs. But standard lugs can easily be purchased in aluminum-compatible variants at no additional cost.
Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?
I can only imagine why?
It’s only US states that don’t arrest people for stealing that have this issue
Not true that it's limited to certain states. It's a nationwide problem, according to AT&T.
https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention
Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.
https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...
Sadly, the US is not alone here.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...
No, this is becoming widespread. The Brazilfication of the first world has largerly accelerated in the last few years.
You violently punish a few of the thieves and problem solved. Why have other countries solved this problem yet america pretends there isn't a gigantic Solve Problem button that is yet to be pressed? Just cane thieves! Imagine how beautiful our country could be.
These thieves are probably drug addicts and have mental health problems. The “violent punishment” (I think you mean capital punishment) is not going to be a deterrent for them, unlike for normal people who can still think with normal risk-reward calculus.
Ah man, I guess we can’t do anything then.
America locks up more people per capita than basically any country on earth, so your theory that this is easily prevented by harsh penalties doesn’t make sense.
We can't have nice things until we migrate away from desperation-based economics.
A few years ago, some foreigners entered a subway depot in South Korea, drew graffiti, and left the country before they were caught.
South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.
A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.
The U.S. locks up a far, far, far higher rate of people than any other advanced economy. The U.S. locks up people at 5x the rate of South Korea. Whatever the difference is, it’s not because the U.S. is unwilling to punish people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The issue is that the US perceives poverty as personal issue rather than public issue. If my neighbor has no housing their likelihood of becoming addicted is way higher than if we simply gave them a house to live in, and far cheaper than constantly policing them.
The issue in the US is that punishment is comparatively harsh but relatively few criminals are punished and punishment is usually quite delayed. Studies show that timely, consistent punishment is much more effective.
The difference is in consistency in enforcement and general background crime rate.
If you have a nearly guaranteed chance of getting caught doing something, the punishment almost doesn't matter. If every single time you went over the speed limit you got a $500 fine 100% guaranteed, there would be effectively zero speeders ever. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting caught but the punishment is 10 years in prison - there will still be plenty of speeders all over the place.
Humans do not do well with estimating risk on low probability events. We are all just big children in the end. Consistency in consequences are what actually matters, not overly harsh punishment.
You think that was a good use of resources and not something deeply dystopian and authoritarian?
Yes.
But California.
killer robots will solve the problem don't worry
Imagine if companies could pay meth addicts in meth the amount of work they could get out of them would be incredible.
No because now you're using land that could be used for other things, which is exactly what this avoids. This takes existing land that loses water and costs money, and makes it lose less water and make money.
That’s true of everything you build. The cost of land has to be taken into account, but land is much cheaper in some areas than others.
In California most of the land around the aquaduct is valuable cropland. The other side of it is at risk of wildfire.
That's true in general, but California aqueduct land is mostly valuable cropland, and the other side is at wildfire risk
You are assuming that land is expensive and forgetting that building and maintaining panels over long a canal is harder than building over a large plot.
Harder but obviously not physically impossible either. From the image I can't imagine what the showstopper would possibly be. Technician on a little dinghy instead of a stepladder doesn't seem like a big deal. Presumably they make it where you can pull the panel off easily if you need to.
You're talking about something that is probably at least 10x the cost to build and maintain. You're making something simple, like swapping a single solar panel, from a ground-level one-man job into now a multi-person job with specialized equipment and water hazards.
Thats 10x the cost somehow? I doubt it. They put solar in all kinds of awkward areas where a technican can't just show up and turn a screwdriver from ground level. Seems it works somehow. Chances are if they go with this, they will have some maintenance craft like a barge platform I'd guess, where the job would be made effectively no different than a ground level job (aside from bringing over the barge which could be quite simple in design, e.g. wood platform raft made from drums and a cheap outboard motor on one end, it's only in the aqueduct after all not in any open water or current.)
You're also not getting the free cooling capacity of the water which makes the panels more efficient - though that probably only drops the total cost 5% or so, but how much extra the heavier supports cost may not be much more...
How about hanging solar panel vertically on tall buildings covering every floor except the first few to prevent vandalism
As the earth moves the sun would only hit one side and lose efficiency but right now it's "free space" not being used otherwise
They even make flexible solar panels now that can bend and move with the wind and don't need a stiff frame, slightly less efficient but volume makes up for that
Clean them the same way automated window washers work on skyscrapers
Shame they never came up with the solar paint solution, yet
The best explanation I've heard is from a PV installer. He said, "Every try to get a suntan standing up?" Seems you lose too much sun exposure to make it worthwhile.
I didn't try to get a suntan, but I have gotten tans while standing up. It's called working outdoors (and not properly covering up, which I'm paying for now).
That said, the economics of vertical installations have changed. The cost of panels keeps going down, and as it does it's starting to make sense depending on your location and how you're orienting your vertical panels. Remember, almost all solar panel installations will be suboptimal unless they include a mechanism for tracking the sun. The question is how bad is suboptimal, what's the cost of the panels and what's their energy yield?
Distance from the equator helps. As does if it snows where the panels are, then vertical simply not having snow on them plus the reflection of the snow helps quite a bit in winter.
I've got many a sun burn standing as has anyone else who's toiled away outdoors doing something while shirtless and white...
I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.
Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.
I'll assume that installer is not near as Irish as I am.
Vertical mounted bifacial panels are more efficient than horizontal mounted panels.
Wouldn't the rooms inside need more lighting then? I wonder about where the break even point is on those differences. I'm not educated in this area enough to even guess.
Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.
But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.
Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?
That aint' gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel. And don't even think about fabric shade sail types of things, nobody is going to want to replace those every 3 years.
This is not something you can just ignore
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the engineers who worked on this project must be stupid".
To be fair, there are fabrics that last a long time. ETFE is an example. A fair comparison should price the solar cover against fabric.
That being said, solar panels are not that heavy, and fabric is every bit as subject to wind loading as solar panels.
There isn't a need for more copper. The canal already has electrical transmission lines.
Almost all the fields in the area is being used for valuable crops. It would be difficult to harvest them if solar panels were installed.
The wind on the valley side of the coastal range is intense. A cheap shade will need considerable maintenance.
There is little chance two separate projects would be cheaper than a combined project.
21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026
https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar. As of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA
Is this enough solar? Just keep building. Enough sunlight falls on Earth every ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...
Put the solar panels in a field
They paved paradise, put up a solar array.
The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.
They're load-bearing.
A desert isn’t exactly paradise. A whole lotta desert in California.
Using solar to generate electricity uses far less land per unit that growing corn ethanol
Solar panels don’t weigh very much at all. I would think the difference in weight between building a durable shade system that can weather the elements, and something that can hold solar panels is not very big at all.
Land is expensive you are not counting the cost of land itself.
In this case they have to build an expensive structure to cover the canal anyway. The span is large. Putting solar panels on it increases the loading and requires a slightly stronger structure, but might improve the financials of the project enough to make sense.
This is directly addressed in the article.
oof, that is a crap ton of steel. I doubt those panels will ever harvest enough energy to offset the energy use to produce both the cells and supports.
I imagine with cells in that configuration, lifting wind loads are significant which is why it's overbuilt like that.
Perhaps some laminate timber for the cross supports?
Lastly, the US has got to start eating seasonally. The water problem in the southwest is all agriculture: people want to grow baby spinach in January. Unless we figure out a way to create a crap ton of energy cheaply so we can supply industrial sized flows without worrying about the energy cost, we use far more water than we should in California and Arizona.
Electricity is incidental (and a nice benefit) to the goal of "reduce evaporation of water from the irrigation canal and improve water quality".
That it's green energy and can help supply the power demand is a bonus.
While I agree those steel supports are large, that seems insanely wrong to me, but not an expert so curious if someone with more info could comment.
According to my searches, steel production is something like 6-8 MWh/ton to extract, refine, and shape. A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% effiency. This thing produces 1.7MW at peak. so call it 3 MWh/day average to account for a lot of adverse conditions over the lifetime. Thats 27000 MWh... so unless we are looking at more than 3000 tons of steel (we aren't) the steel production is accounted for. A panel takes something like 1.9 MWh equivalent in energy.... and again we aren't looking at 13K solar panels in this pilot.
So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.
Steel takes about 4.750 kw-hours to produce per kg.[1]
A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]
So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.
Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.
Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.
A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-do...
[2] https://www.cahomesolar.com/feeds/blog/solar-panel-energy-pr...
[3] https://www.mascotsteel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/st...
Furthermore at the end of the steel structures lifespan it will be recycled in a manner that is far more energy efficient, requiring only 25% of the total energy. And that's in the case it wasn't from recycled materials in the first place.
Fair. But the almonds and alfalfa would like a word, especially since the alfalfa is shipped around the world for others to consume in some way.
So while it's definitely agriculture as a serious source, it's not just the US as the driver of that source.
No thanks
What is it learning?
If only there was an article to explain it.
I think you mean learing
When you read lines like "California’s extensive network of canals and aqueducts is the lifeblood of the state, providing clean water to populous cities and expansive farms that wouldn’t otherwise have it." you have to ask how we ended up with these canal systems, what the tradeoffs are in a landscape setup this way rather than one where water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated, and who owns water rights in California.
Build Soil has some interesting threads on this:
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3lmeddjd...
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3mkzybkk...
(note: I'm not trying to totally bash the solar panel project nor some of the key figures involved who've done great work like Dustin Mulvaney, but do think we should think about how we ended up here)
I thought this was a pretty awesome video to provide the lore on how water got to Southern California. Growing up in Pasadena I heard the name Mulholland and Eaton (as in canyon) all the time but never realized they were so instrumental in the founding of the city and all the wild shenanigans that went into getting the water from up north to LA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-RGL15Skuo
There's also a practical engineering video on it: The Los Angeles Aqueduct is Wild https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhW2BjFQCZM ( https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/3/17/the-los-angeles... for blog post transcript)
In searching YouTube history for it, I see I also stumbled across this project too: Why Aqueduct Solar Solves 2 MASSIVE Problems https://youtu.be/EVBacmPfQ6E (about 9 minutes in it gets into the engineering challenges mentioned else comment about wind loads and such).
What I'm trying to gesture at isnt engineering prowess though but better questions around how California changed over the past 100ish years and the issues around land-use change and relationship to water. See things like what Yasha Levine has done such as:
- Pistachio Wars film - https://pistachiowars.com which talks about the changes in water use and canal development
- the original article 'A Journey through Oligarch Valley' from 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20151115054847/https://www.nsfwc...
The PE video gets into that history from the start...
And then t'wards the end:
There's some engineering in there (I don't recall this one having any garage models though). It's mostly about the relationship of politics to the engineering project.
Living in Pasadena/Glendale, dad living in Palmdale where we would spend weekends... I would pass by that famous section along the 5/210 split often. Was always fun to see the lights on and the roaring water coming down.
Back when they thought they could pay their way out of problems. Looking at you florida everglades
I would love to see the major cities in California start building desalinization plants.
Every plant built would give us a much needed buffer and in the good times could even let us refill ground water (we'd never do that, I know).
That and investing in better rainwater management -- those muddy torrents of water that pour into ocean would be much better if slowed down upstream and allowed to percolate into the aquifers.
You do realize that agriculture uses 80% of the (mostly free) developed and deliverable water, while urban cities use about 10%?
That's true of basically all of the West and the Colorado River, too.
Sure do! But people die in a few days without potable water, crops are usually more drought resistant.
And yes, I do get the point that if you suggested we build $6B desalination plants to grow lettuce people would balk and say, "That's not worth the money!". We should use less water on crops.
It's bad but one thing not often pointed out in this conversation is that about 50% of water used in irrigation for agriculture returns as groundwater. In most other cases, used water ends up in sewers or evaporating
50% of 10% is still only 5%.
Powered by solar
Most desalination plants (at least the ones that are economically viable) focus on brackish groundwater, not ocean water. This contributes to the problem GP is pointing out. California already does more desalination than any US state other than Florida.
But there's a million environmental restoration projects we could be doing right now to increase the water holding capacities of our environments that are simply not being sufficiently funded. The science is pretty well done on most of these strategies while desalination of ocean water is still mostly an experimental technology that is not economically viable.
Israel is using desalination for agriculture. What's your definition of economically viable?
Good questions I guess but what more specifically are you saying would happen if we delete the canals? What does "the water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated" mean?
Presumably deleting the canals means water will still be relatively scarce and the distribution will simply by different and not controlled by the state.
I think they're trying to point out how little effort is put into environmental restoration that would allow our environment to hold more water instead of having most of our rainwater wash out into sewers. Some of the loss in the environment's ability to hold water is due to large infrastructure projects in the first place. We are heavily draining the landscape and its causing us to lose critical topsoils (some of which took thousands of years to make).
Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.
Huh, California goes to extreme lengths to try to capture runoff?
Are there risks of any poisons or chemicals from the solar panels leaking into the water system over time?
Maybe, but ideas like that are what you all will use to eventually turn against solar and seek to ban going off grid as you see a disparity between those who can afford to buy solar and those who can't. Why's that a problem? Those who can will go off grid and those who can't will be left on a grid that they can't pay for, and it will crumble. We are already seeing the beginnings of this in California.
Have you seen the price of solar?
Yup, it's dropping dropping dropping. But it's still out of range for most.
Housing is out of range for most, but hopefully regulations will change to allow for balcony solar, which means that renters would be able to buy a tiny bit to offset their costs, and move it to their next place.
Off grid? That's one way to go.
~ https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2025/october/ocean...
Grids are useful to balance out sources and sinks, make battery farms economical at scale. You do need smarter grids to deal with phase imbalances.
This hacker entered the thread thinking this was a good idea but leaves muttering “man, things are complicated.”
Are there any risks of mercury settling into the water system over time from coal power plants?
Are there risks of heavy metal and tire contaminates from vehicles leaking into the water system over time?
Are there risks of dust blown contamination from the megatons of shit humans leave everywhere we go leaking into the water system?
The answer is everything has risks, the risks from solar panels are unbelievably tiny in relation to all other pollution sources and I have to deal with a bunch of redneck solar panel haters that have bought in to massively overblown risks around them.
Risks? Hah! You don't want to worry about that. You want to worry about the municipal tire fire and the radioactive slag pit!
False binary
No, this is a right wing talking point against solar that isn't based in fact.
A small risk according to this nature study
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41893-021-00693-8
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
They should give credit where credit is due. Solar panels on top of irrigation canals was pioneered in the Indian state of Gujarat back in 2012[1]
[1] https://www.autonocion.com/us/arizona-solar-panels-irrigatio...
They don't mention Gujarat specifically, but they do mention the prior projects in India and Arizona (which your link discusses) in the article.
You need to credit someone for "hey lets use solar panels to shade things that would benefit from shade"?
62% is pretty respectable for the size of California (same electricity consumption as Spain). I did not know this.
this part of the claim is carrying a ton of weight here... Zero-carbon sources could include carbon dependent sources with paper offsets.
Electricity sources are tracked by the California Energy Commission, the 2024 report [0] shows the zero-carbon sources that make up this claim are:
2% from biomass is suspect as a "zero-carbon" source, but the rest seems to be reasonably be zero carbon by today's standards.
[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Yes, I was impressed with this number as well. I wonder when we'd reach 75-80%, but I believe the zero-carbon electricity target is 2045?
It is impressive, but it’s also why electricity is $0.34/kWh in California
grid maintenance is massive but wildfire liability is a larger problem California faces more than any other state
if only California didn't ban cultural burns in the first place
And as of the writing of this comment, ~7pm, about 25% of CA's grid is supplied by batteries: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
I was shocked when I saw how much batteries contribute, honestly don't hear about them much but they have scaled a lot in recent years.
Amazing what California can achieve when they don't have to deal with constant cease-and-desist lawsuits, eminent domain battles, environmental review challenges, etc (crying in high speed rail)
It’s definitely respectable, I was surprised it’s such a high percentage.
Unfortunately it’s the reason California has the highest price for electricity in the country as well (not counting Hawaii). Looks lone they are paying ~$0.34/kWh, ouch. The average is ~$0.15/kWh in my state.
As someone who isn't in California, it's understandable that you might think this. It is, fortunately, wrong.
The biggest driver of costs of electricity in CA are (1) paying for damages caused by grid-initiated wildfires, and (2) paying to upgrade the grid to prevent future cases of (1).
This information comes directly from the government who approves rate increases for regulated utilities, and who has to publish their spending. PG&E, the primary power company, is also a public company and their financials are therefore public.
Rooftop solar specifically (and not general grid-scale renewables) do shift the cost balance of fixed-cost infra and consumption based usage, but the wildfire issues dwarf this.
Also the 2nd highest electricity prices in the USA behind Hawaii
Can photovoltaics be recycled? I know they degrade over time.
Yes. The vast majority of a solar panel is glass and metals. Both are easily recyclable.
The material itself is not the problem I’m concerned about. The metal gets doped and transformed into configurations that could be hard to be unmade.
No, it goes in a shredder you’d use for e-waste disposal and ~90% of the material can be reused.
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.firstsolar.com/Solutions/Recycling
A 1 square meter solar panel that weighs around 10kg contains under half a kg of actual doped silicon photovoltaic cells, with the remaining >95% being mainly aluminium framing, glass to cover the cells, and some backing material and wiring, all of which are trivially recyclable. So even if the doped silicon wasn't recyclable (which it is with a little more effort than the other materials) that's hardly the majority of the material that goes into making a solar panel.
Umm, if you can completely enclose it in a pipe then why in the heck couldn't you put an 8-10' tall roof over it?
Typical local government (and I worked for one): "We didn't do it that way when I got here and it sounds like a lot of work and will be a change so let's rationalize doing nothing"
I think it just might be that this is something that makes sense in some situations and not others.
"Sorry, you have been blocked"
Well I guess I won't be reading your article then.
The way so many web sites are now banning whole parts of the world is killing the Internet.
No ROI estimates?
just remember to pay PGE for connecting to the grid
I wonder if we couldn't build solar panels also over stretches of highway.