Arizona’s solar-over-canal project will tackle its major drought issue::undefined
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Arizona's solar-over-canal project will tackle its major drought issue
Submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/arizonas-solar-over-canal-drought
Comments
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hugin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s also a win win design. Shade from the panels reduces evaporation in the canals and the water helps cool the panels which improves their efficiency.
LostAndSmelly@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It would be cheaper and easier to maintain separate instaaleions of a lightweight cover for the aquaduct and solar panel installed on solid ground. You could use the same money to add square miles of panels.
Lophostemon@aussie.zone 11 months ago
I really hope this works. Also: banning water-intensive farming in dumb places might help.
Diplomjodler@feddit.de 11 months ago
It would definitely help because that is the main problem.
praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
What do you mean I can’t farm on a fucking desert? What kind of communist dunghole is this?
badbytes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Or we could put effort towards limitations of fossil fuels and fix it long term. Maybe both, but if we don’t do former, only duct tape.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Luckily this does both, to some extent. It’s not as far as we need, but solar offsets dirty energy usage.
ikidd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t understand how it “offsets”. If someone pisses in the pool and I do it behind a tree, that somehow gets rid of piss molecules in the pool?
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Doesn’t Arizona get most of its energy from the giant nuclear power plant near Phoenix?
Perkele@lemmy.whynotdrs.org 11 months ago
My guess is that producing solar panels uses tons of fosil fuels. And they’re pretty much used up after 10-20 years and needs to be replaced and the old ones ends up in a landfill.
seaQueue@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Water Knife here we come
rustyriffs@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Synopsys?
seaQueue@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Water scarcity causes societal collapse throughout the American Southwest. Well written book, interesting premise - just an all around enjoyable bit of fiction.
Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Good book :)
captainjaneway@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Open canal systems should be illegal. This is the dumbest shit we do. At least top 10 dumbest.
Dave@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
As someone who knows nothing about canals (or what they are even used for), anyone want to explain why they are used, why they are dumb, and what we should do instead?
seaQueue@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Evaporation. You lose a phenomenal amount of water moving it by canal over large distances in an arid climate. Ideally you’d enclose the whole system to reduce loss, sticking a roof over the top helps and is less complicated.
Shihali@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.
Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.
Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.
captainjaneway@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Imagine a canal which is 3 feet wide at the minimum. It contains a constant volume of water. This canal ultimately waters farm land. By way of example, California has the imperial valley which contains these canal systems. They feed desert farm land. The problem is these canals are often:
- open
- in a hot dry desert
- cheap
Water rights have perverted water usage. People take cheap water which was grandfathered in by old laws and agreements and they waste it to evaporation. If you think “well the water isn’t lost, just evaporated, right?” You’d be close, but slightly off the mark. The water is evaporated but it’s transported often hundreds or thousands of miles from its original source. We are basically bleeding rivers to feed a desert. And deserts might as well be an infinite sink for water.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Hundreds of miles of shallow canals in the middle of the desert, where regular exceeds 120° f. The water evaporates very quickly.
meco03211@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They should try this at those retaining ponds where they filled them with black balls.
greybeard@lemmy.one 11 months ago
There are several companies working on solar covers for reservoirs. I agree, seems like a win win. Reduce evaporation and have a large, level, “field” for solar arrays.
LostAndSmelly@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This idea is so poorly conceived. Imagine installing and maintaining something like this. How are those panels supposed to stay clean?The panels and the cover should both be built but they should not be the same thing. No current panels are engineered for this application so they would have to be custom made. Just getting the project to the point where the first panel could be installed would cost millions. We could get started now installing commercially available shade covers and ground mounted solar. Ground mounted solar is simple to clean, simple to maintain, and simple to replace.
I agree the idea looks like a great way to reclaim the space, reduce evaporation, and generate power I just think the money would be better spent on a plan the optimized for expenses and longevity instead of optimizing for novelty.
Chocrates@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I guess I missed it but how are these panels any different than typical ground based PV panels? Looks like, based on the rendering, they they are on some kind of rigid scaffolding over the canal. Not sure how that is different from typical installs?
For sure cleaning them is a problem, don’t have an answer to that. Hope that that is accounted for in the proposal.
squirrelwithnut@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Arizona and the entire South West don’t have a drought problem. They have an aridification problem. While this canal project is a good move in general and we should have been doing it years ago, there is no solving the over-population of a desert. One look at Colorado River basin and its reservoirs is enough to know there is nothing we can do to fix it.
BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 11 months ago
With any luck pretty soon they’ll look at alfalfa farming in the desert too
ieightpi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why the fuck are humans so stupid that we decided to grow one of the thirstiest crops in the fucking desert.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 11 months ago
They already do.
Also, all those new Intel wafer plants near Phoenix.
Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah… but sometimes you’ve gotta accept that a band-aid is all you can do. While this doesn’t fix the underlying problems, if it works it’ll provide more water and low carbon energy, which is better than nothing.
DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Unfortunately they will just use even more then, so the “shortage” will be maintained.