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On 50 acres you could get maybe 5MW peak power, extrapolating from the utility-scale project being built in San Benito County claiming 247MW on 2500 acres.
by thrownaway2424 12y ago
On 50 acres you could get maybe 5MW peak power, extrapolating from the utility-scale project being built in San Benito County claiming 247MW on 2500 acres.
- adventured 12y agoFor reference it takes 38 megawatts of power to generate 50 million gallons of water per day from that San Diego plant.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoThat's 150AF. An orchard needs at most 4 feet of water per year, and let's say you can count on 1 foot of that falling from the sky. Your 50 acres of solar could therefore produce enough water every day to irrigate 50 acres of orchard for a year, or in other words if you devoted less than 1% of your land to solar power you could irrigate the rest of it with desalinated water. Of course, California producers would never do that because they would have to put up their own money. History shows that what farmers want in the way of infrastructure gets paid for by the public (dams, aqueducts, levees, drainage, etc). Edit: whoops that's high by almost a factor of 10x, but I'll leave it the way I originally wrote it.