146: Discovering Covering Canals – Solar Panels + Water

Hello everybody and welcome to Still To Be Determined. Today we’re gonna be talking about saying goodbye to Gondolas. . That’s right. Matt is on a one person program to cover every canal in the world with solar panel. And we’re here to stop him. my My Evil plan. Yes. First we cover the canals, then power in sharks with

laser beams.

That’s right. As usual, everybody. I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids. I’m also curious about technology and how it’s changing our lives and luckily for me, Works out perfectly with my family relationships such as , the one, the only. Matt Farrell still undecided.

That’s right. How you doing today, Matt? I’m doing good. How about you? I’m doing well. As usual, we talk on this show about Matt’s most recent episode from his channel, undecided with Matt Ferrell, and for this week, that means how solar panels can solve California. Drought. This episode dropped on November 29th, 2022.

But before we get into that, I always like to share a comment from a previous episode. This one’s from episode 1 45 in which Matt and I were game prepping for Thanksgiving. And we bemoaned the fact that typically you sit around for several hours afterward going, oh, oh, oh. Why did I eat a Turkey ? There was this recommendation from Chatter on the wire who weighed in with this useful advice, the fix.

Use self-control. Dude, stop overeating. Where were you a week ago? . I know. Sounds, sounds. I have no self control. So easy, doesn’t it? Yes. Oh, you don’t like eating too much then Don’t eat as much. What? What?

And you, but then you see that apple pie and you’re like, oh, there’s plenty of room

for that apple pie.

Yeah, it’s like, like I am full of stuffing that has sausage in. So I’m gonna take some Turkey and eat that as well with gravy on it. Yeah. And sweet potatoes with marsh power, of course. And what is better on Brussels sprouts than bacon? So, oh man. Yeah. Yeah. We have traditions that wanna kill us, but onto today’s discussion, how solar panels can solve California’s drought, not drought, as some people would.

Those people are a little weird if you ask what’s wrong with them. Nothing wrong with them. I, I, in fact, I think they’re probably snappy dressers, . So the point of this idea is really two birds, one stone. It’s, yes. It’s a little bit from like, oh my gosh, we have this terrible water issue in. Not just the United States.

This is global and a lot of the progress that you talked about in your video is actually on the global front where Yep, there have been efforts that have shown a lot of promise in India. And so this is not Americans leading the charge and, and you know, showing the world the way, this is really kind of America’s slowly recognizing like, oh, we could be doing something similar.

Yes. Was a lot of this born of that kind of observation? Did the University of California research go to India? Are you aware if they did that? I’m not aware if they did that,

but one of the reasons I focused on that report was cuz it’s one of the first studies that’s shown what the results of this can be.

So the idea really kind of took foothold in India like a decade ago and it’s been growing since then and now the studies are showing what the actual benefits can be and that’s what this study from the University of California was. Hmm. I, I, I hope it didn’t come across as like, Hey, the US just figured this out in my video.

It wasn’t that it was, yeah, India really is leading the charge here on this, and I, I would not be surprised if it was the instigation for the University of California, but I don’t know for sure.

And as far as, you know, there’s the, the Nexus project. Is that a public private amalgam where it’s public sector mixing with private, or is it completely a private endeavor?

I’m not exactly sure if it’s a mix or not. I was under the assumption it was kind of a private thing, but there might be public money involved. I’m not exactly sure.

Mm-hmm. the obvious public need for clean water and for water that is usable for farming. The irrigation issue. There were some comments like this from Pale Ghost where this is said with a wink.

I can tell he’s winking at us as he says this. Hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t have open water moving through 140 degree concrete channels through a. Yeah. In a perfect world that we started building today, I think that that would be a pretty obvious approach. Like, yeah, let’s not take our drinking water through the desert.

But this is really an issue that is born of how long it has taken human communities to be where they are. Mm-hmm. and at the time that these human communities were being developed and settle. There was none of this concern. This was a solution to a problem. We have water over here, we need it over there.

Let’s dig a channel and get it over there. Easy peasy. Yeah. Plenty of water for everybody. No big deals. We we’re seeing this across the board in the United States as water usage, and Matt, I believe we had another discussion around this on a previous episode where, Calculations of how much water each state could use from, I believe it was the Colorado River.

Yes. . Yes. And the numbers were just like made up. They was just made them up. Somebody was just like, well, we would need this much water. So let’s say that’s what we have and Right. Like, so this is born of an era where humans impact on the environment was really not on anybody’s radar. Nobody cared. Nobody cared.

There were plenty of resources for everybody. When you think about Luke Westward expansion of the original settlements in the United States, moving west, they literally manifest destiny. This is God’s gift to us, and, and we just, it’s clearly here for our use. Now, centuries later, we look around and say like, where did our water go?

And . So, you know, hindsight being 2020 pale ghost touches on a raw nerve, which is, yeah, if we were to do this all over again, there would probably be different ways of approaching. Oh, absolutely. How do utilize our land? But that cat’s out of the bag. People are where they are. And if you’re not gonna start literally resettling.

Which the US government just this week reached a deal to pay millions of dollars to various indigenous people’s reservations to move their communities because they are in areas where water will rise as a result of flooding. So short of doing that, literally moving communities, we have to figure out a solution to, well, the people are where they are.

So what do we do? So here’s this kind of, so. But

beyond that though, as we talked about already, this is like the symbiotic relationship between the solar generation and conserving water. Yeah, we would do it differently, but this is the situation we have and there’s that benefit of you put solar panels over these canals, it actually improves the energy generation of those panels.

So it’s kind of like, Great. It’s like, okay, we can reduce the evaporation and increase the electricity generated and we need the electricity anyway cause we’re looking for clean, renewable, cheap electricity anyway. Mm-hmm. . So it’s kind of like the, why aren’t we just doing this? Making the best of a bad situation.

lemonade, what is it?

Making a lemonade. Lemons. Yes. Yeah. There were also comments like this one from sustainable, renewable, integrated. Who wrote, this is a good idea as long as there are plenty of interconnection points with available hosting capacity for these mini solar farms to connect to the grid.

Yep. I imagine that the context of California. I imagine that there are communities all along most of those waterways. Oh, yeah. So that’s not gonna be an issue, but it does raise that question, not only in California, but globally in different areas where you may have a waterway that may be the perfect, like one of the things you talked about was the direction of the angle of the waterway.

To the sun. You want it to be able to work dynamically with how you’re gonna have to angle the solar panels. Yep. If you might have a stretch of waterway that is kind of remote compared to other areas, that’s going to be a hindering factor as well, or require more infrastructure development as you talked about, all the different things that have to be done in order to make these things.

Yeah, you definitely wanna have this close to where it’s being used, and I did not make that super clear in the video, which is why the whole population density issue is part of the problem too, because you have a population dense area. It’s like, oh yeah, we have plenty of land over here. Yeah. The problem is nobody lives over there.

And then you have to figure out ways to get that electricity from over there to over here, which has efficiency, losses, costs associated to it. So you wanna try to generate the electricity as close to that population as possible, and that’s where you have less land. So it’s kinda like that’s, that’s the, the problem that you’re struggling with here.

I didn’t make that super clear in the video.

I think that, so, Return to something that we raised at the beginning of this discussion, this comment from Sharan. Kadakia caught my eye. Sharan writes, I am from Gujarat, India. I have been following Matt for more than a year now, and I’m very proud today to see him take inspiration for my home state, as most of his videos cover America and the UK only.

And I just wanted to give you an opportunity, Matt, to first of all, you. I’ve never ever heard you have an American centric focus on anything. Understandably, a lot of the channel does deal with American tech or European tech, but I was curious, what do you have coming up that might be some of these more global things like the, the discussion of the developments in this technology in India.

Do you have other things that you’re gonna be looking at in the future that would be doing similar things? Yeah, there’s

two countries that are like kind of on the bleeding edge of this stuff are India and Australia. And I’ve been releasing videos recently, one about India, like this one I’ve been releasing videos about some new battery tech that’s coming out of Australia, zinc, bromine, batteries, things like that.

So it’s like, and then there’s a fusion company called HB 11, which is down in Australia. So it’s like I’m starting to focus more on those regions cuz there’s a lot of really amazing great things coming out of that region that aren’t covered. And I wanna try to bring those more into the conversation, but I, I understand why people think I have a American focus part of that unapologetically.

I’m American . This is where I live. It’s my neighborhood. So it’s like I’m seeing things in my neighborhood. I’m gonna talk about what’s happening in my neighborhood, but I do try to cover as best I can. Things that are bubbling up from all over the world and Europe and Australia and elsewhere. It’s like, I don’t, I try not to have a bias.

I’ve talked about India before, like when it comes to like electrification of, uh, like boats and things like that. There’s really interesting things happening in India around that. So it’s like I’ve, I’ve covered it before and I’m gonna try to cover more of it in the future, but I try my best to be a global.

News coverage. Mm-hmm. . But at the same time, bulk of my audience is here in the US So I do try to provide a lens into that from a US perspective. So like that was this one where I talked about it from the perspective of this University of California research to bring people in of, hey, we could probably help with California here.

but we learned it from India. So it’s like I’m, I’m trying to take that approach. Um, so hopefully more global coverage. I, I’m, I’m always trying to be open minded about all.

I would also point out Sharan, this is a great, uh, place for you to share anything that you see a hundred percent as your local context and you see something that you think that would be interesting for a wider audience to find out about it.

You could always shoot Matt an email through his contact information on this main page. You can do it in the comments on the videos like you did here. One of the, the big things that we’re constantly reminding our audience about, The discussion on this particular channel is entirely driven by comments.

We like to weigh into the comments on Matt’s videos, but his main channel also gets a lot of inspiration from viewers who show up and say, Hey, here’s a thing that maybe you haven’t heard about. And some of that is stuff that that sends Matt running with his research team to look into these things.

There was some conversation around other ways of doing this, taking existing land. Use and just layering solar panels on top of it. The advantages that you talked about in this video, the water is cooling for the solar panels, making ’em more efficient. The land literally can’t be used for anything else because as you pointed out, nobody’s trying to build a condo on the canal.

Although here in Gowanus, Brooklyn, there’s some developments in that regard. So we have what is considered. One of the most polluted waterways in the United States. They’ve been trying to clean it and building condominiums, literally. Right. Uh, next to it, like practically on top of it with the vision of turning it into housing that would have, like, you’ve got waterway views.

Of course that also comes with waterway mosquitoes in the summer. So yes, it’s a little of, uh, six and one half dozen of another, but there. Comments like this one from Tom Dalton who said, around the country, in more rural areas, large parking fields can be a great spot for panels as well as right over buildings surrounded by parking fields.

It’s about many little projects and few large projects. The big projects should support and supplement many smaller projects, not the other way around. There’s a little bit of, of a downside to, you know, reusing parking spaces as you you mentioned. Anything that’s just going to normally absorb the heat and then retain it is going to make the panels less efficient.

But that doesn’t mean that Tom is going down a bad path. I think that his, oh, no. His argument is, is spot on. If you have land, which is being used for only one thing, figure out a way to add something on top of. The

parking lot structures is becoming very popular, and you’re seeing it more and more like where I live.

There are so many elementary schools and high schools in my area that have done that to their parking lots. And the benefit, the cross benefit is it cools off the cars. Yeah, the cars aren’t baking in the sun, so you’re getting the electricity generation. It’s not, you’re not getting the benefit of the cooling effect of water or, uh, agriculture to cool the panels down.

But you are getting a secondary benefit for all the people who are parking their cars and keeping them cooler , so they get the cars to leave. They’re not baking. There’s lots of ways to use reuse space like this, and I’ve, I’ve actually talked. Developers that have products and they specialize in doing just that.

And from everything I’ve talked to ’em about, it sounds like the demand and interest in that just keeps growing. And building. And building. Cause people are seeing the benefits of. Oh, I, my building isn’t large enough to really get a whole lot of use out of it. I can’t get all the electricity I want, but oh my God, I have this massive, like, mall parking lot.

I could just like coat panels and then completely cover the electricity usage of the mall. So it’s, there’s, there’s a lot of interest growing in this, and

it’s all very important. It’s, it’s, it has real impact on people’s lives. As I spotted in this comment from Larry, who wrote, having traveled thousands of miles through California in my life, gazing out over the vast areas and canals, I often thought they should be covered and protected from the daily heat and sunlight.

The sheer scope of this is immense. The cost of labor and living is very high. We would need slaves or robots to build it. Let and maintain it. I still see a dream and pray for a solution. It’s not looking very promising right now. This is an issue that is real and it impacts people’s lives, and right now we’re seeing it in global drought.

We’re seeing it in the video that Matt shared. The population density in India, the power needs there, the usage of that and the, and the, the places that they have are limited in being able to utilize this kind of technology, but it has a real impact on people’s lives, and I think that’s important to remember.

So listeners, what do you think about all this? Do you see this as a way forward? And would you support public effort to build this kind of technology over waterways, or do you think that that money would be better spent in other ways? Let us know in the comments. You can jump into the comments on YouTube, or you can reach out to us through the contact information in the podcast description.

As usual, thank you so much for your. As I mentioned before, it really does drive the content of the show. And if you’d like to support the show, please consider reviewing us on Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever it was. You found this. Go back there and say, Hey, thumbs up for these guys. Yay

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In our discussion on Matt’s most recent video and this week, that’s going to be how solar panels can solve California’s drought. That’d be drought. Wow. . As I typed it earlier in my notes, I was like, I wanna say that as drought. And then I did. Yep.