A water and electrical utility in central California will set up a first-of-its-kind community of photo voltaic panels on water canals. Turlock Irrigation District (TID) has secured a $20 million grant from the state to pursue the first-in-the-nation challenge, which might serve a useful double whammy: create renewable vitality and avoid wasting water within the course of.

Project Nexus is predicated off an evaluation published final yr in Nature Sustainability, which put some actual numbers behind the concept photo voltaic panels over canals might do some good. Loads of water in California wends its method via the state’s 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) of open supply canals that comprise the aqueduct system, transporting water provide from the Sierra Nevada mountains and northern elements of the state to reservoirs, lakes, hydropower crops, and farms. The water provide within the state is already underneath severe twin threats from overuse and local weather change, so each drop counts. And these uncovered canals have a severe flaw: They enable a few of that valuable water to evaporate.

Covering all of the canals within the state with photo voltaic panels, final yr’s evaluation discovered, might save 63 billion gallons of water yearly—concerning the quantity wanted to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or to provide 2 million folks with their water wants. (California has 9 million acres of farmland, so this saved water isn’t precisely a panacea to the state’s water overuse—however in a drought, each drop counts.) Those panels, the examine’s authors calculated, might provide 13 gigawatts of photo voltaic vitality, a couple of sixth of the state’s complete vitality wants. The water’s cooling impact, in flip, might assist preserve these photo voltaic panels working extra successfully, since photo voltaic panels lose some effectivity on highly regarded days.

This challenge would solely cowl two small segments of canals in Stanislaus County exterior of Modesto, producing, the utility stated, sufficient energy for round 100,000 houses. But TID stated that the trial, scheduled to start development this fall and be accomplished in 2024, is meant to function “proof-of-concept” of how the panels work and the way a lot set up and maintenance prices, with the concept to develop the concept to different areas of the state.

Figuring out the right way to maximize house round and underneath photo voltaic arrays is nothing new. There’s a rising follow known as agrivoltaics that seeks to raise photo voltaic panels on farmland to permit agricultural exercise to nonetheless happen, whereas floating photo voltaic panels have been deployed in locations like Japan and Singapore. But developing photo voltaic panels as a safety measure for irrigation canals is a brand new concept. It received’t repair the West’s severe water use issues or the mounting menace local weather change poses to water provide, nevertheless it does signify the sort of inventive resolution California must discover because it stares down a water-scarce future.

“A lot of water gets evaporated just because we don’t put a lid on it,” Brandi McKuin, the paper’s lead creator and a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz, instructed Gizmodo final yr. Makes sense!