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13 April 2023
By
SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA
NEW YORK TIMES
California Wants to Cover
Its Canals With Solar Panels
![](images/images_04_21_2023/pic1%20copy.jpg)
FILE - Water flows along the
All-American Canal Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022, near Winterhaven, Calif.
(AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)
Despite a very wet winter, California’s water
scarcity woes aren’t finished.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has resisted declaring the
drought to be over. Just this week, a proposal from President Joe
Biden raised the possibility of new, painful water cuts for
California. And the state seems increasingly trapped in a pattern of
severe storms followed by extreme drought, without much of a happy
medium.
So perhaps it goes without saying that water
conservation will continue to be a central issue in the Golden State
for years to come.
A new state-funded project in the San Joaquin
Valley hopes to find a new way to build drought resilience. The idea
is simple: Cover the state’s canals and aqueducts with solar panels to
both limit evaporation and generate renewable energy.
“If you drive up and down the state, you see a
lot of open canals. And after year after year of drought it seemed an
obvious question: How much are we losing to evaporation?” said Jordan
Harris, co-founder and CEO of Solar AquaGrid, a company based in the
Bay Area that’s designing and overseeing the initiative. “It’s just
common sense in our eyes.”
The California Department of Water Resources
is providing $20 million to test the concept in Stanislaus County and
to help determine where else along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals —
one of the largest water conveyance systems in the world — it would
make the most sense to install solar panels. The project is a
collaboration between the state, Solar AquaGrid, the Turlock
Irrigation District and researchers with the University of California,
Merced, who will track and analyze the findings.
“This hasn’t been tried in the U.S. before,”
said Roger Bales, an engineering professor at UC Merced who
specializes in water and climate research. “We want these to
eventually be scaled across the western U.S., where we have a lot of
irrigated agriculture and open canals.”
California’s efforts got a jump start from a
2021 study published by Bales and his colleagues, who determined that
covering the state’s canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation
by as much as 90% and save 63 billion gallons of water per year —
enough to meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million
people.
The team identified other possible upsides:
The installations could generate large amounts of energy; reduce algae
growth and the need for maintenance by limiting sunlight falling on
the water; enhance the functioning of the solar panels by allowing
them to stay cool near the water; and improve air quality by creating
an energy source that would limit the need for diesel-powered
irrigation pumps.
The sheer number of benefits documented in the
study eased hesitations about the idea and “kind of changed our
thinking,” said Josh Weimer, spokesperson for the Turlock Irrigation
District, which volunteered its 250 miles of canals in Stanislaus
County for the pilot. Another benefit for the district, which is also
a power provider, is that it doesn’t need to buy new, costly tracts of
land to install solar panels since the canals are already its
property.
The project, expected to break ground this
fall, will start out on just 2 miles of canals in the Central Valley
district. I recently visited one of them in the small agricultural
town of Ceres, just outside Modesto off Highway 99, where the
concrete-banked canal winds through shady orchards and past narrow
farm roads frequented by tractors.
The results will very likely be closely
watched. Harris told me he had already been contacted by water
districts and canal operators around the world — including in Spain,
the Philippines and Brazil — that are curious about replicating the
design.
“This is a global issue, and potentially a big
contributor to a global solution to evaporative losses and renewable
energy generation at the same time,” Harris said.
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