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 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.

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.

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...

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.

Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.

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.

What empty, bare land?

Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anecdotally speaking

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Never attribute to malice… etc.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply to acts of clear malice.

There used to be a house opposite me in Chicago that was a big crack/meth dealer. They would accept literally anything as payment. People would turn up there all day long with storage totes filled with random crap. The crap would be picked through, narcotics exchanged and then the rest thrown out the back. It was an excellent source for storage totes, though I sometimes had to retrieve my trash can from there as they would steal half a dozen of them every week to put all their leftover crap into.

Good to see your comment as always.

I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.

You in a decent spot now?

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns.

We do. Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

The problem will solve itself in a few weeks. Hang the fences, and the thieves will starve. It's both way easier to go after them, and they have something to lose if they don't follow the law.

Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?

How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?

Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?

If it's a scrapper willing to buy sketchy sourced copper, they'll be the type that pays the least for it.

They don't need to know if something was stolen. All they need to do is require an ID, not pay in cash, and pay 30 days after receiving the merchandise.

California’s tried cracking down on catalytic converter theft with significant measures. (I think a legitimate scrapyard would have to do a bunch of paperwork to buy a cat.) Anyone know the outcomes?

There was a nationwide catalytic converter theft ring for the first few years of the pandemic. Junkies around the country would steal cats and ship them off to New Jersey. The ringleader pleaded guilty last year: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...

I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.

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

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.

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 don't need to differentiate because I am not trying to solve that problem.

I suppose you'd agree that some drugs will actually hamper one's ability to function as a productive member of society, whether or not it is illegal; for example, heroin. So if heroin was legal and you could buy it at the pharmacy, and you become addicted and you lose your job and alienate your friends and family, why wouldn't you also end up stealing copper? Maybe heroin being illegal would have made that trajectory one step shorter, but I don't see the story changing fundamentally.

Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?

No differentiation here, alcohol is widely available from legal sources and very affordable compared to illegal drugs.

I come from a country with social healthcare, and here we also heavily subsidize drugs for people who need them because of their own lifestyle choices, e.g. diabetes medicine due to obesity. Why do people who have become addicted to psychoactive drugs not deserve the same compassion?

Obesity is a bit more complicated than "lifestyle choice"; I don't think it's worth engaging with your question without you understanding that.

So is drug addiction, and that's my point.

You can become addicted if you're mom is a junkie. You can become addicted from scripts given to you by Dr.Feelgood. There are many ways of becoming an addict without waking up one day and deciding "I'm going to become an addict today".

The root cause is all the people addicted to drugs. We are never going to entirely stamp out addiction, but certainly there are structural things we can do with our society to make it less common, and make it easier for people to get out of that situation.

I don't think dangerous, addictive drugs should be legalized, or available to buy at pharmacies. People who traffic in these sorts of drugs should be jailed.

But possession and use should be decriminalized. People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

Ultimately, a healthy society that actually takes care of the people who live in it will have fewer people getting into addictive drugs in the first place. That's a huge lift, though, unfortunately: fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way.

fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way

On food insecurity: the five states that are the least food-insecure are a swing state, two solid red states, and two solid blue states[0].

On housing insecurity: the states with the most affordable homes (median house price to median income ratio, or share of income spent on housing) are for the most part solid red states[1]. I would wager this is largely due to stronger private property rights in red states that make it easier for supply to rise to meet demand and establish a better-functioning rental market[2].

Let's not make the mistake of judging politicians and government programs by their stated intent and not their factual outcomes. Whether someone "wants to" fix society in one way or another is very, very far removed from whether it actually gets fixed under their leadership. Plenty of times in history, the problem actually got worse!

On income and wealth inequality: unfortunately, these things cannot be fixed except by fixing the fact that different people have different abilities, talents, preferences, and tastes, and some of those differences include the ability to make money and build wealth. Nobody would look at me and think I have an equal chance of making it in the NBA as, say, the guys in this picture[3], but for some reason we're supposed to believe that when it comes to the skills of moneymaking and wealth-building, anyone is about as good as anyone else.

[0]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/food...

[1]: https://www.affordabilityindex.org/rankings/states/, https://www.businessinsider.com/every-state-ranked-by-housin...

[2]: In parts of California, tenancy laws are so insane that it could take a landlord over a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to evict a nonpaying tenant. There's a whole cottage industry of landlords paying those same nonpaying tenants good money to just leave quietly. If you had property to rent, how much extra money would you charge to compensate for this risk?

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft#/media/File:NBA_Draf...

People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

I agree with you, but it's worth spelling out exactly why. Philosophically, prison has one of three purposes: protecting society, rehabilitation, or punishment.

If the sentence for use is anything less than spending the rest of your life in jail, then society isn't really protected from addicts; the recidivist rate is too high. Get out, steal again for the next high, rinse and repeat through the revolving door.

Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts. Leaving aside drug smuggling into prisons, getting people past the withdrawal period is the "easy" part of rehab, the real work is in therapy, developing better relationship models, better boundaries, better strategies for the triggers that drove people to look for a high. It's very, very difficult to facilitate that in prison.

Finally, it's debatable whether prison is actually punishment for addicts. If they keep access to drugs through the people who smuggle them into prisons, and the prison pays for meals and a roof that were often lacking for the addict on the street, then, is it really a punishment?

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.

Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals

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...

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.

Or, you view them as human beings who are desperate and try to help them instead, and probably save money in the process? People who find themselves addicted to opioids or other drugs would not have to steal copper in the first place if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave.

if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave

What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?

probably save money in the process

That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.

This is a good question. Off the top of my head:

* Less crime because people who are addicted to drugs do not have to raise instant money for their next fix,

* Getting open, visible drug use off the streets and into a controlled supervised setting (this is not strictly part of safe supply though, but an orthogonal related service),

* Making drug use safer for the users by ensuring quality and consistent strength. Fentanyl, orphines and nitazenes are killing lots of people, and they exist on the market not because of demand from the users but because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture and smuggle than heroin.

* Making it easier to help the drug user by removing the burden and stress of obtaining the drugs. This is often an endless cycle of stress which leaves no room for getting help.

* Making it possible for drug users to be functional members of society. Not all people who are addicted to drugs need to stop, for some the safer choice is to accept that they are dependent and work around it. Taking opioids to prevent withdrawal is not incompatible with holding a job and contributing to society, committing crimes to get money for the next fix is. For many people who are addicted to opioids, abstinence programs are not the best option because the rate of falling back to using is very high, and once that happens the risk of fatal overdose is also very high due to decreased tolerance. I won't quote concrete numbers because I cannot remember them right now, but last I heard the rate of failure in abstinence programs was well above 70%.

* By supplying the drugs from sources that have no financial incentive in keeping the drug users on the drugs, you can ensure that users are exposed to all public offers to get help with their addiction or any underlying socioeconomic factors that are probably contributing to why they have become addicted in the first place.

Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate. I believe that to be true, and I think that a much better way is to address the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime. It doesn't mean that we should stop at the safe supply, because that would indeed be the cynical approach, we of course also have to help people overcome all the problems that are probably keeping them in their drug addiction, such as mental health issues and homelessness.

But shouldn't that be coupled with mandatory de-addiction program participation? Otherwise, how does the problem end?

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 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.

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.

Yes, this is why “death penalty for everything“ wouldn’t suddenly eliminate crime.

What would that look like - increasing the number of US police officers by 2x etc. to ensure they catch every person who commits any crime? Reducing the rights of those accused of a crime to ensure they don't skate?

Or maybe what constitutes a crime should be rethought (e.g. there is no reason at all to keep the "war on drugs" going, it clearly has failed), and instead focus on prevention?

That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.

What would ‘prevention’ look like? (As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.)

My thoughts:

- Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?

- After setting up safeguards to enforce privacy protections, vastly increase the use of camera-based traffic enforcement. For example, create separate traffic enforcement agencies so that police don't have access to camera data. Use trajectcontroles (Dutch word for a system where multiple cameras on highway entrances/exits track your license plate and ensure your average speed was below the limit), cameras that detect texting while driving (pioneered by the UK), microphone-linked cameras in residential areas that detect modified exhausts (pioneered by Taiwan), and HOV-lane enforcement cameras. Keep traffic officers focused on ensuring that everyone has a valid/viewable license plate. The result should be a system where committing small traffic violations is not normalized.

- Reduce the punishments for most crimes. Large punishments are cruel, expensive to dole out, and less effective than consistent enforcement + small punishments.

- Set high expectations for police officers and create a culture of accountability. Fire those who are playing on their phones and arrest those who are committing crimes. You probably need independent oversight agencies to be able to do this.

- Make police highly visible - bright yellow high-vis vests and cars (pioneered by Antwerp) ensure that police are there to deter crime rather than hide and catch it.

- Provide actual public services so that people have a chance to succeed. A variety of unpleasant behaviors (e.g. public defecation, being disruptive/yelling in public, public drug use/intoxication) are things that no one wants to do - they are driven by a lack of, for example, homeless services, mental health services, and drug treatment services.

- Reprioritize enforcement (looking at you, drug task forces). Expand the legal definition of entrapment and stop doing so many B.S. sting operations.

Your point only stands if you assume that Americans and Koreans commit crime at the same rate, which is eminently false. The high rate of incarceration in the US is directly downstream of higher criminality compared to other advanced economies.

In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.

US has massively lomger sentences. It does not have that much higher ceime rates, but it loves to lock people.

It does not have that much higher ceime rates

This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.

That's just due to issues in regulating gun ownership, though.

A Scandinavian economist reportedly said to Milton Friedman:

“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”

Friedman replied:

“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”

You think that was a good use of resources and not something deeply dystopian and authoritarian?

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Or you can give poor people some sort of support so they don't have to ride in public transit just to have a place to sleep without being exposed to the elements?

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized.

Come to Europe. Sure, the truly rich still drive in SUVs, but in general, people of all backgrounds take public transit, and "gated communities" are not a thing here.

Imagine if companies could pay meth addicts in meth the amount of work they could get out of them would be incredible.

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

I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it

This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).

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?

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.

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.)

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

How about hanging solar panel vertically

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.

"Every try to get a suntan standing up?"

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?

construct a cheap shade over the entire canal

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.

it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.

This is not something you can just ignore

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.

It would be far easier to build solar on highways. The median strip on interstates is quite wide.

Those are oftentimes safety features designed for cars to survive entering without anything to hit.

The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.

They look like ordinary “bents” for prefabricated metal buildings which are about the cheapest kind of building per square foot. Made out of steel, they are typically sold at a cost per ton like other steel shapes.

The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.

So I agree it is a dumb idea but not because of the cost of steel but for the lack of modularity and abundance of inaccessibility.

No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof

Cherry pickers like they’re used for every other type of infrastructure.

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?

Not if you already own the canal but would have to buy or rent the fields.

I like to point out once you leave urban areas land is really cheap. And land without water rights or with poor soil is really cheap.

The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.

If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.

putting tarp over the canal might be an even cheaper solution? You dont need metal to make shade.

Not from USA so forgive my ignorance.

Shouldn't the obvious solution be to fix the "permitting requirements" rather than spend 6x on building kn undeveloped land?

Should the purpose of laws to serve the people rather than to tiptoe around laws and claiming "be we have strict zoning laws"?

Why is there a law that you yourself call "insane"?

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.

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.

What is it learning?

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...

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).

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

No, this is a right wing talking point against solar that isn't based in fact.

It's definitely brought up by anti-solar crowds. It's more accurate to point out that the risk is small rather than to dismiss the genuine concern. Solar panels can actually increase water quality because they replace diesel generators according to this nature article

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8

The concern is not completely unwarranted:

Because over-canal systems are subject to a more humid environment than ground-mounted systems, over-canal PV panels might have increased reliability problems45. In tropical conditions, the water content in the encapsulant can exceed solubility, which can lead to the formation of droplets of water in the modules, sometimes causing corrosion or other problems

But overall "field experiments have shown that CdTe semiconductors can withstand hot and humid environments."

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...

>The state currently generates 62% of its electricity from renewable and zero-carbon sources, with the largest percentage of that coming from solar

62% is pretty respectable for the size of California (same electricity consumption as Spain). I did not know this.

and zero-carbon sources

this part of the claim is carrying a ton of weight here... Zero-carbon sources could include carbon dependent sources with paper offsets.

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

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.

Also the 2nd highest electricity prices in the USA behind Hawaii

Imagine how much more expensive it would be if renewables didn't make up such a big share.

Probably cheaper? Renewables have a big upfront Capex usually financed.

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.

The solar cells are tightly glued to the glass. Glass is easily recyclable but obtaining it and cleaning it is nearly impossible. It's also treated with antimony to increase its durability which limits how you can handle it. About 90% of all glass in solar panels has been landfilled.

A minor point anyways. Glass is not exactly a precious resource.

The most valuable parts are obviously the silver (about 50% of a panel's scrap value despite being 0.1% by weight), aluminum (about 20% of value), silicon (about 15%), and copper wiring (about 10%).

We are only just beginning to figure out techniques to reclaim the silver using thermal heating and chemical leaching techniques

So at the moment it’s not really recyclable.

Even though the canal is fenced in, “we have instances where we have cars go into the canal — we’ll have people go into the canal, and animals go into the canal,” Allen said, describing some of the challenges they faced as an urban water district.

“What Turlock is doing with their projects is very impressive, but we have a different-looking canal system going through our service area,” Allen said. They are looking to put their canals into pipes to avoid evaporation, instead.

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"

No ROI estimates?

I wonder if we couldn't build solar panels also over stretches of highway.

Harris said he spent a lot of his life in France, where he noticed how trees lined the canals and protected their precious water from the wind and sun

So why not plant the trees?

They used to do that in Phoenix. There were trees all along the canals. They replaced that setup with a solid uncovered concrete canal system. The issue with trees is that the roots will cause leaks in your canal.

In an effort to limit warming poised to dry out the state, California pledged to shift to 100% clean electricity by 2045.

Well moving to sustainable energy is good, but California being on 100% clean electricity won't have any measurable effect on its warming.

$20M for 1.7MW of capacity. Over $10 per watt. Recent utility scale installations in California are more like $1/W.

There'd be some cost reduction from scaling up, but 10x is a huge gap to close. This is a waste of money.