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.
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.
Cherry pickers like they’re used for every other type of infrastructure.
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.
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).
Been happening occasionally for at least a decade.
And still has a yearly 6 to 8 million euro in damages from copper thieves just on the rail system alone. And that doesn't include economic damages from people being late for work.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
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.
- 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.
Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.
We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement
That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.
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.
“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”
Friedman replied:
“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”
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.
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.
Yes.
But California.
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...
I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.
You in a decent spot now?
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.
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?
Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.
You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.
Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).
Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions (which make up the overwhelming, massive majority of legitimate trade in this space), but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.
> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs
Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.
What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.
I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.
I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.
FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.
I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.
I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.
not “do the right thing for society”.
Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?
I can only imagine why?
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...
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...
Happens a lot in Texas too.
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.
One prisoner costs the California taxpayer $125k/yr, all in.
Maybe the company should foot the bill for a security guard instead of asking the taxpayers to subsidize their business.
I don't know what kind of hellscape you want to live in where you need private security to keep anything you own from being stolen, especially something as mundane as some wires.
Looks like the vandals will have to move along to somewhere else to score some copper.
It's a big problem in Texas too. Quick google search returned several hundred articles.
The company wouldn’t employ the guard unless it saved them money, reducing losses by more than $80k. For Many businesses that’s not going to make sense. Even larger businesses, have larger risk footprint, needing more security guards, needing more loss savings to justify.
Your math implies polar winter. Solar would be a bad investment.
In remote areas if you only guard at night they will go in the day.
The correct read of “Corporations are people, my friend.” is that people are indeed responsible for individual corporate humanism - being moral in how they operate even inside a company - or expect social repercussions at minimum in return.
Having said that: I’m not 100% sure who should pay (and at what portions) for what’s being debated.
Come to think of it, who needs communally regulated safety services like jails, prisons, and law enforcement? In addition to having a private guard, every company should have their own in-house holding pen and justice system :)
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Grandmaster Flash on “Birth of a Culture” | The New Yorker Radio Hour
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
-Tom O’Donnell
Why would a company spend their own money when they can have someone else spend their money instead?
> As the 5 p.m. cutoff to pass bills approached Tuesday, Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, launched an unusual bid to bog down the Senate process. She demanded Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, a Democrat, to have the chamber’s secretary read all 39 pages of a bill focused on electrical transmission infrastructure. Usually, the clerk reads the first and last line of legislation into the record. Heck agreed.
> This maneuver killed the transmission bill, as well as several others Senate Democrats were hoping to vote on before the deadline. One of those looked to address surging theft of copper wiring. Senate Bill 6190 would’ve imposed new recordkeeping requirements on scrap metal businesses and made destroying “critical communications infrastructure” a felony.
Better luck next year, I guess.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington%27s_7th_legislative...
It's only 10% below the rest of the US.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
I am frankly appalled by the absence of compassion towards other people in this thread.
If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.
Some drugs are genuinely dangerous. Many are addictive and will damage the quality of one's life, even if buying and using the drug isn't illegal. Normalizing addiction to drugs as a regular, normal, accepted part of everyday life is not the answer.
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.
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?
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.
* 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.
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
And dont think about any kind of social support net and caring for people that would be girly and a socialism. Can't have that.
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.
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 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
That being said, solar panels are not that heavy, and fabric is every bit as subject to wind loading as solar panels.
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the people who worked on this project must be stupid".
Not if you already own the canal but would have to buy or rent the fields.
Plus the people selling it to you will simply play you off each other since you're publicly committed to buying it. Like with that train they're building.
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.
The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:
Project Nexus tests not one, but three different solar canal models.
... accordion-like retractable panels are positioned low across the narrow canal, ready to roll up at a moment’s notice.
Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.
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.
Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.
Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)
Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.
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.
Yeah sure, let’s put solar panels over the last section in Bakersfield where all the canals merge. More power, less evaporation. That’s great! But it’s not going to move the needle in California.
* if you go backpacking in the Sierras you’ll often run into one of the canals. They’re both cool and scary. It takes hours to get to them and every time I see one i have to wonder how they managed to build it (it’s been decades so any construction damage has mostly grown over)
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"?
Almost all the fields in the area is being used for valuable crops. It would be difficult to harvest them if solar panels were installed.
The wind on the valley side of the coastal range is intense. A cheap shade will need considerable maintenance.
There is little chance two separate projects would be cheaper than a combined project.
They paved paradise, put up a solar array.
The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.
They're load-bearing.
Your comment, which I found at the top of the stack here, did not survive the first pass of that scrutiny.
> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field,
Yeah, sounds nice. But the desert surrounding popular parts of California does have natural life. It has life whether it is owned by someone (who can make a stand to say "No"), or it is owned by the public. The life there doesn't know.
But that desert life, even when it it seems insignificant, still needs light in order for it to survive. It has a very narrow ecosystem in which it can survive.
> and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?
This is what a cheap shade over an artificial canal tends to look like when it is meant to survive the elements. (This particular shade under discussion just happens to also to produce electricity from solar energy.)
> The supports in the picture are massive
As they would also be for a shade
> and don't look cheap.
None of these activities are ever cheap.
> Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field.
It's good that you can imagine things. Some people are not so-blessed.
> You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.
Oh. So, you caught everyone with their pants down! So clever. Big Copper should be very ashamed of themselves right now because, by way of your plan, the gigantic expense of copper for a large solar farm has been increased to a slightly-larger expense! The entire ploy to cover the canals was a sham all along that was motivated by selling more copper!
Please, tell me: Would you want to receive the Nobel prize directly, or would you rather be seclusive and receive it by proxy?
> Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper.
You're free to spearhead a movement to do that yourself, if you're so-inclined.
And hey! When you do, then at least some of the water supply canals will be already covered! That hard part will have already been done. Win-win!
There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.
... 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.
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
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.
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?
I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.
Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.
This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...
https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar. As of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA
Is this enough solar? Just keep building. Enough sunlight falls on Earth every ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...
Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.
But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.
Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.
So why not plant the trees?
Redoing swimming pools due to close by trees seems to be quite common construction work job.
62% is pretty respectable for the size of California (same electricity consumption as Spain). I did not know this.
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.
Flattening the Duck Curve: batteries reach 44% of evening demand in California - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633698 - April 2026 (5 comments)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Unfortunately it’s the reason California has the highest price for electricity in the country as well (not counting Hawaii). Looks lone they are paying ~$0.34/kWh, ouch. The average is ~$0.15/kWh in my state.
The biggest driver of costs of electricity in CA are (1) paying for damages caused by grid-initiated wildfires, and (2) paying to upgrade the grid to prevent future cases of (1).
This information comes directly from the government who approves rate increases for regulated utilities, and who has to publish their spending. PG&E, the primary power company, is also a public company and their financials are therefore public.
Rooftop solar specifically (and not general grid-scale renewables) do shift the cost balance of fixed-cost infra and consumption based usage, but the wildfire issues dwarf this.
this part of the claim is carrying a ton of weight here... Zero-carbon sources could include carbon dependent sources with paper offsets.
Nuclear 9.92%
Large Hydro 11.06%
Biomass 1.94%
Geothermal 4.60%
Small Hydro 1.52%
Solar 21.30%
Wind 11.89%
[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Well moving to sustainable energy is good, but California being on 100% clean electricity won't have any measurable effect on its warming.
Well I guess I won't be reading your article then.
The way so many web sites are now banning whole parts of the world is killing the Internet.
>“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"
[1] https://www.autonocion.com/us/arizona-solar-panels-irrigatio...
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)
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).
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.
I made a very clear distinction there between brackish water and ocean water.
That's true of basically all of the West and the Colorado River, too.
And yes, I do get the point that if you suggested we build $6B desalination plants to grow lettuce people would balk and say, "That's not worth the money!". We should use less water on crops.
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.
Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.
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).
- 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...
On November 5, 1913, tens of thousands of people climbed these hills to watch the first water arrive. When the gates finally opened, water trickled through, but that trickle quickly became a torrent. The project’s chief engineer, William Mulholland, leaned over to the mayor and shouted the line that’s been repeated ever since: “There it is, Mr. Mayor. Take it!”
That moment was profound for a lot of reasons, depending on where you live and how you feel about water rights. LA didn’t become LA by living within the limits of its local resources. Its meteoric growth into the metropolis we know was enabled by an early and extraordinary decision to reach far beyond its own watershed and pull a whole new river into town. Today, roughly a third of LA’s water comes from the Eastern Sierra through the Los Angeles Aqueduct system. That share swings with snowpack, drought, and environmental constraints, but this one piece of infrastructure helped turn a water-limited town into a world city. It’s one of the most impressive and controversial engineering projects in American history.
But it many ways, it was not only unscrupulous, but also short-sighted. Residents of the Owens Valley watched ranchland and farmland dry up as the water that had shaped their home was rerouted south. Native communities saw their homeland transformed with access to gathering areas disrupted, places made unrecognizable, and cultural ties strained by changes they didn’t choose. Wind picked up alkaline dust from dried lakebeds. Habitats were disrupted, and the birds that depended on these waters and wetlands lost part of what made this migration corridor work. It’s easy to see why the aqueduct remains controversial, and why what we sometimes dismiss as “red tape” around major infrastructure is often completely justified due diligence. As engineers, and really, as humans, we have to try and account for costs that don’t show up on a balance sheet, but can come back later as decades of lawsuits, mitigation, and restoration.
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41893-021-00693-8
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
Australia is leading the world in rooftop solar adoption. By June 2025, 4.2 million rooftop solar systems had been installed nationwide representing 26.8 gigawatts of clean power generation capacity connected directly to local electricity networks that serve homes and businesses.
“In the evenings homes typically consume power, which flows from large power generation plants, such as wind farms, hydroelectric, coal and gas-fired power plants. Let’s call this the ‘low-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation,” he said.
“In the middle of a sunny day, however, today about 40% of Australian homes generate their own power from rooftop solar panels. When the rooftop solar generation exceeds the power consumption in the houses, the excess power is ‘exported’, flowing back to the grid, supplying other homes and beyond. Let’s call this the ‘high-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation.”
Grids are useful to balance out sources and sinks, make battery farms economical at scale. You do need smarter grids to deal with phase imbalances.
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."
Of course, if a solar panel is broken, ground up and falls into a canal, it would put some heavy metals into the water.
The risk is basically zero and far lower than any other power generation source. It is a nonsense, bad faith "concern".
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
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.firstsolar.com/Solutions/Recycling
> One kilogram of First Solar’s semiconductor material can be recycled 41 times over, which translates into a use time of more than 1,200 years.
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.
> The duo went on to start Solar Aquagrid, an advocacy firm dedicated to reimagining aging canals, and partnered with the Turlock Irrigation District, UC Merced and the California Department of Water Resources to cover small sections of Turlock’s canals with solar panels. The new “solar canal” provides shade to limit evaporation and generates power all in one neat package. They call it Project Nexus, and it operates at the intersection of the state’s need for clean water and energy.
> ...
> But the canal site hosts more than just panels. Bales said they “have instruments out there to measure temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, incoming radiation, outgoing radiation, and a prototype instrument to measure evaporation directly.”
> When it comes to algae, the panels helped. “Last year when we drained the canal at the end of the irrigation season, there was a physical line on the sun side of the canal that had algae growth and then not algae growth from where the shade was,” Weimer said.
That it's green energy and can help supply the power demand is a bonus.
Fair. But the almonds and alfalfa would like a word, especially since the alfalfa is shipped around the world for others to consume in some way.
So while it's definitely agriculture as a serious source, it's not just the US as the driver of that source.
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...
Yo! Wake up sheep! Solar and wind energy are the two cheapest and least polluting ways we have of producing energy!
So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.
Just a nit, that should be:
A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% of its original effiency.
While I agree those steel supports are large, that seems insanely wrong to me, but not an expert so curious if someone with more info could comment.