Cover the California Aqueduct in Solar Panels to Double Down on Energy

It’s a nice idea, but people have been talking about putting solar over the State Water Project for years, and it hasn’t happened yet for a number of reasons, mainly tremendous cost.

Where’d you get the numbers on how much water would be freed up by reducing evaporation on the canal? The SWP director recently said that evaporation on the canal is somewhat insignificant, and you can bet that any water above the “harm” threshold for Delta smelt and chinook salmon will go directly to SWP contractors in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles. USFWS and the CALFED/Bay-Delta Conservation Plan already mandate that minimum flows be maintained on the Delta for environmental reasons, but ANY extra water goes straight to the contractors who are only getting a fraction of their state and federal allotments after the recent 3 year drought. So your environmental point is moot, unfortunately. Frankly I’d like to see a HUGE reduction in Delta water that gets pumped southward to fuel development in a desert, but with the CA referendum voting system and the majority of voters in Socal, I doubt that would happen even if people DID pay attention to water resources out here.

Also, instead of making the project state-owned and trying to fund a 400-mile long PV array on nonexistent public funds, why not put the real estate out to bid for private contractors, in a partnership with PG&E? CA utilities are scrambling to hit the 33% RPS by 2020 so PG&E would probably fund part of the project with its own revenues, and having them hire contractors would remove the need to build an energy grid and regulatory framework that supports private interests selling power back to the grid. As an analyst at a municipal utility I can tell you that making this a public-funded public works project would likely increase the cost and time till completion. Would you rather have expensive public power that competes with publicly-funded services like education, or efficient “private” power delivered through a capped and regulated utility that doesn’t add to our debt?

Finally, the power would be nice, especially for offsetting the demand from the Edmonston pumps’ combined 1.12 million horsepower. But in terms of security, having local generation only goes so far. You still need to build CCGT or other power stations that can absorb the spike in demand on the grid that happens when a cloud passes over a plant, or the sun goes down, which it tends to do. You’d have to build out “dirty power” infrastructure that could produce equivalent capacity to the PV array And switching all that power still requires a smart, centralized grid, that is susceptible to hacking.

I like where your head’s at (I grew up in Palo Alto and despise the Peripheral Canal as an alternative to fortifying Delta levees), but solar companies have been floating ideas to the DWR for years, but the lack of practicality and wide-scale benefit has impeded that progress.

Most of the concrete channel in the inland part of the State Water Project were built with one bank made so that solar panels can be installed on it- not on the water. Fungus and bacteria would grow in the water if covered. Only the greedy “nature” groups of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy are holding up installing solar panels on the aqueduct. If somebody is willing to pay the millions in extortion fees to these groups the job can be done. Been blocked for 50 years now.