Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That's 150AF. An orchard needs at most 4 feet of water per year, and let's say you can count on 1 foot of that falling from the sky. Your 50 acres of solar could therefore produce enough water every day to irrigate 50 acres of orchard for a year, or in other words if you devoted less than 1% of your land to solar power you could irrigate the rest of it with desalinated water.

Of course, California producers would never do that because they would have to put up their own money. History shows that what farmers want in the way of infrastructure gets paid for by the public (dams, aqueducts, levees, drainage, etc).

Edit: whoops that's high by almost a factor of 10x, but I'll leave it the way I originally wrote it.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: