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Thank you for providing links! The first one contains a lot of the same doubts I have and points out that this is an exploratory project explicitly because the

Thank you for providing links! The first one contains a lot of the same doubts I have and points out that this is an exploratory project explicitly because the ROI is unclear. The second one is a bit strange. Here’s the actual paper [1]. And what they actually studied was “ To address this critical knowledge gap, we quantified the evaporation savings and financial performance of over-canal solar in comparison to over-ground solar on land adjacent to canals”. So they’re assuming leaving the canals uncovered and siting solar power plants on expensive ag land instead of covering the canals cheaply with traditional shade materials and using the savings to build power generation on cheap land elsewhere. Not very convincing to me. Personally, I think the net benefit will be negative, but I’d love to be proven wrong on this. [1] https://escholarship.org/content/qt8cj5j07p/qt8cj5j07p_noSplash_da7010b14e05c8089355f67e9f443a6f.pdf?t=qq63ir https://escholarship.org/content/qt8cj5j07p/qt8cj5j07p_noSpl...

epistasis 4y ago
The most negative thing I see in that article: > At some point, the costs associated with conserving an additional drop of water exceed the benefits,” she says. But, she notes, if solar expansion is inevitable, then maybe hanging the panels over canals could tack on some extra benefits that might not come from building elsewhere. Which is only counting part of a positive, and excluding the value of the electricity. > cheap land elsewhere Not really sure where that's going to be in California, what are you thinking? And then if you use distant land, you have to pay for new transmission, which dwarfs the costs of solar panels and inverters. Solar hardware is incredibly cheap these days, and getting cheaper by the day. Putting solar panels instead of non-generating materials will miss out on all the benefits of how cheap solar PV has become. We should think about PV panels a lot like microcontrollers: so cheap that they can be thrown into all sorts of applications that would have been shocking 20-30 years ago.

epistasis 4y ago

The most negative thing I see in that article: > At some point, the costs associated with conserving an additional drop of water exceed the benefits,” she says. But, she notes, if solar expansion is inevitable, then maybe hanging the panels over canals could tack on some extra benefits that might not come from building elsewhere. Which is only counting part of a positive, and excluding the value of the electricity. > cheap land elsewhere Not really sure where that's going to be in California, what are you thinking? And then if you use distant land, you have to pay for new transmission, which dwarfs the costs of solar panels and inverters. Solar hardware is incredibly cheap these days, and getting cheaper by the day. Putting solar panels instead of non-generating materials will miss out on all the benefits of how cheap solar PV has become. We should think about PV panels a lot like microcontrollers: so cheap that they can be thrown into all sorts of applications that would have been shocking 20-30 years ago.