445
Arizona's solar-over-canal project will tackle its major drought issue
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
445 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
72441 readers
2625 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Or we could put effort towards limitations of fossil fuels and fix it long term. Maybe both, but if we don't do former, only duct tape.
Luckily this does both, to some extent. It's not as far as we need, but solar offsets dirty energy usage.
My guess is that producing solar panels uses tons of fossil fuels. And they're pretty much used up after 10-20 years and needs to be replaced and the old ones ends up in a landfill.
It takes energy to produce them, sure, but it's way less than even just the production needs for coal or natural gas. Not to mention that's a one time carbon cost (per lifespan which is close to 30 years these days) vs ongoing emissions. And additionally, as the energy mix where the panels are produced cleans up, the carbon footprint of the panels go down as well! Is it the perfect solution? No, but there is no silver bullet to get off fossil fuels. Solar is just one part of that transition and it is exciting to see more groups exploring the solar/shade synergy (there's some cool shaded farming solar experiments going on that also make use of the solar panel's shadow for additional benefits!)