An ingenious idea for multiple problems

Sometimes it is possible to solve two problems at the same time, and this is one of the cases, in California as in many other places where it rains little, it rains very just and water is needed for crops but global warming is causing it to rain more and more less.

Global warming changes the rainfall regime causing it to rain more in some places and less in others, in California it is the second case, that is to say that droughts increase and rains are reduced, in fact the year 2021 It was one of the driest years of the century, so much so that at the gates of autumn in California they faced around 90% of extreme water scarcity, according to data published by the University of California.

Water is therefore something valuable and that is why it has to be channeled there, there are 6,437 kilometers of canals, but as in any other place on the planet, they also need energy and, if possible, clean and non-polluting energy, such as solar energy, but solar energy needs a surface to be able to install the panels, so technicians from the university of california have proposed taking advantage of the canals to cover them with solar panels.

It would look something similar to the above, we have with this solution we have the surface that is needed to obtain solar energy and we also have another advantage and that is that the loss of water by evaporation is reduced since the channels would no longer be open to the sun. , this is quite important since it is calculated that between 1% and 2% of the transported liquid is lost through evaporation.

If the 6,437 kilometers of canals in California were covered, some 295,500 million liters could be saved each year, enough to supply more than 2 million people, and how much energy could be achieved with this method, since the technicians of the University of California have calculated that this system would provide 3 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, more or less half of the new contribution that California needs if it wants to meet the objectives that have been set in terms of decarbonization and green energy, and this In addition, it would avoid having to dedicate 32,400 hectares of land to solar farms, a land that could be quietly dedicated, for example, to growing food.

But there is a small problem and that is that by covering the canals a small additional cost of infrastructure has to be made, but according to the technicians from the University of California they believe that the benefits of saving surface area and avoiding evaporation would compensate for that small additional cost for create those structures to cover the channels.

The images you are seeing are illustrations of what it would look like, the project is called NEXUS and it is expected that it will begin to be built in what would be the first installation in the fall of 2022, it seems to me a great idea that solves multiple problems especially in those particular areas where canals abound, and where it is required to conserve water and generate energy.

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