Bureau of Reclamation Deputy Commissioner David Palumbo joined White House Senior Advisor Tom Perez, Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis and community members recently to celebrate the first energy generated from an innovative solar over canals project funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Our partners at the Gila River Indian Community are at the forefront of utilizing technology to work with Reclamation to conserve water,” Palumbo said. “They are the first to complete a pilot solar over canals project, which will generate renewable energy while conserving water to better inform future projects of this kind.”
The solar pilot project in Arizona received $5.65 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to cover 2,782 linear feet of the Casa Blanca canal with approximately 2,556 solar panels.
The solar panels are expected to generate 1.31 megawatts of clean energy, providing at least 2.26 million kilowatt-hours of annual electricity to the Gila River Indian Community.
In addition to producing renewable energy and conserving water through reduced evaporation, this pilot project that will provide important data on these benefits that can be used for future initiatives and investments.
The Inflation Reduction Act made available $25 million for the design, study and implementation of projects to cover water conveyance facilities with solar panels.
While visiting the Gila River Indian Community, Palumbo also participated in two separate groundbreaking events on pipeline projects to improve efficiency under conservation announced recently with the Gila River Indian Community representing an investment of up to $107 million into three projects with the potential to create system conservation of over 73,000 acre-feet within the next 10 years.
Turlock Irrigation District Solar Over Canals Project
In a recent Q&A with the American Public Power Association, Brad Koehn, the new General Manager of California public power utility Turlock Irrigation District, provided details on TID's Project Nexus, which calls for the installation of solar panel canopies over various sections of the utility’s irrigation canals.
“We have had more media coverage on Project Nexus than I think anything in the history of TID, including international coverage, so really excited to be part of something that has become such a covered project,” he said.
“It's extremely unique. It's a public-private academic partnership, DWR and TID are the public entities.”
Solar Aquagrid is the private entity and the UC system is UC Merced – “the academic piece of the puzzle. So that's a unique partnership to start.”
The project has been funded by the state of California “and really the goals at the highest level are install solar panels over the top of a water conveyance system and study all things you can to determine what are the costs? What are the benefits? How does the project perform all to support how this could be scaled in the future.”
He pointed out that there are “a lot of water conveyance systems in California. And is this a solution that can be scaled large scale and become a solution as we transition to carbon free energy as a state?”
Koehn noted that there have been “claims of solar generation is increased when it's in a more humid or cooler state. How much evaporation is saved by shading the canal? We're really interested in what happens to aquatic growth when you remove sun from the equation.”
TID spends “a lot of money as a district cleaning our canals because of aquatic growth, and I think there could be some real maintenance savings by shading the canal system. And in general this is a solution that is installed on property that TID already owns.”
In comparison to a typical ground mount solar farm – “you're buying hundreds of acres within the district. And because of our water reliability, our land value is significant here. We're [$50,000] to $60,000 an acre. You start doing the math on a large scale solar project and it becomes very, very cumbersome cost wise to be competitive.”
And so “this has a unique ability to be placed on property we already own. It's our canal banks and also TID is a unique project participant because we are an integrated utility as well, so we are the water provider and the electric provider. And so that builds some efficiencies in interconnections, et cetera."
