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Comment by sagarm | Hacker News Reader

$20M for 1.7MW of capacity. Over $10 per watt. Recent utility scale installations in California are more like $1/W.

There'd be some cost reduction from scaling up, but 10x is a huge gap to close. This is a waste of money.

> a $20 million state grant paid for both the research and the infrastructure.

Weimer described the project as a “proof of concept” that generates just 1.7 megawatts of energy, a tiny fraction of the 56 megawatts that they generate with a solar farm in the desert.

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.”

It’s not that simple. It’s a research projects that does more than just solar.

So you need to ask “how much of the grant went into the solar-cover”, and set that up against the value produced (water evaporation, water quality, electricity, etc).

What you did is set the price of the entire research project up against one of its output.

It's fair to note that only some percentage of the costs went to the panels and associated infrastructure, but a research grade weather station costs like $1k. I'm sure the prototype instrument for evaporation cost more; let's say $1M. That still leaves $19M for everything else. Frankly I have a hard time believing the other stuff was anything more than a rounding error.

As for the benefits: $/w already includes the electricity generated. California loses 1-2% of water in canals to evaporation; I think we can safely assume the economic value of preventing evaporation will be negligible when bare panels cost over $5/sq ft.

I look forward to seeing the author's economic analysis in the full report. However, the fact that these were the only numbers in this fluff piece suggests the economics won't be great.

At 1-2% savings of water thats roughly $20M–$40M/year on 2M AF of throughput using the 2024 SWP as base reference for volumes + 1000$/AF.

Though I think saving water in drought years has a massive value that isn't properly measured in this calculation. Likewise in boom years saving water almost doesn't matter.

See what the proposals come in as. See if the politicians turn it into a jobs project for the interior...

I really like the idea of using this as a jobs program to keep the capacity to build, "muscle memory," strong in the workers in this community: metalworking, electrical, etc. There is much left to be built over the next 20-50 years.

The Hoover Dam was also a sort of jobs program similarly.

I mean the industrial policy of America is a jobs program. I think the governments en masse are trying to correct their assumptions from the 90s. Update their priors if you would.

Strong agree!

Construction labor is already expensive in California. We don't need make work construction projects.

I notice there's no surface area in your calculations. Solar panels alone, without labor or infrastructure, cost $5/sqft. What percentage of exposed canals would be covered at what cost?

People are determined to waste our public capacity on projects that make no economic sense. Is it any wonder the electorate doesn't have any faith that government will spend effectively?

Research pilot programs are always much more expensive than the comercialized version will be. The money is used to work out kinks, do a bunch of engineering, discover and account for unexpected issues, and so on. A lot of the work done on there is reusable to make the scaled version cheaper. Further, once the design is settled, economies of scale factor in and you get a much cheaper unit price.

So thats a pilot project - and the benefits aren't supposed to be your 1$/W its comparing the collective of all the goals for the project. So include the water savings and the cleaning costs - then comparing the two of them.

Its also not comparing against utility projects because it isn't utility scale.

> $20M for 1.7MW of capacity. Over $10 per watt. Recent utility scale installations in California are more like $1/W.

It's a) just a trial, and b) not just generating power so that cost isn't factoring in the other benefits.

They prefer to spend $100M on CHIRLA

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