What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
kqed.org
kqed.org
Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper. The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.
The best reasoning they give is that California has insane permitting requirements, and it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.
As an engineer and expert on this though, I'm not an expert. I've looked into it just enough to know that I would expect that it would just not be worth it, but maybe I'm wrong for your case
That is my entire point. Even with many smaller pipes it has not been worth it. A big trench is just more affordable and covering it is probably a better option than replacing it.
BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.
... likely less than the ~$13/W this cost to install, but that included NRE for three different styles of panel mounting. Standardizing would cut costs significantly.
This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...
I would very much like to see a total dollar figure for the example "roof trusses over the canel" structure vs. how many panels it can hold.
It's already true that the ground mounting costs and labor to assemble the ground mount are a huge part of building a large scale PV system.
What empty, bare land?
If its really empty and bare, there is a reason for it and that reason is probably a problem for building and maintaining PV, and otherwise you have to add the loss of the alternative uses of the land to the cost.
Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.
Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)
Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.
Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.
I mean sure, but compared to say having that technician in a dingy boat, its more costly in the sense you need a dingy boat. But this doesn't seem insurmountable. Maybe you don't even need a dingy boat. Maybe just a long 2x12 would be fine or some other scaffold platform you can just drag around. There's also something to be said about this solar array being where the land is already being used, and some greenfield solar array going in, well, greenfield areas that might be ecologically more sensitive.
The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:
Project Nexus tests not one, but three different solar canal models.
... accordion-like retractable panels are positioned low across the narrow canal, ready to roll up at a moment’s notice.
Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.
> The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap.
> Large PV panels make very good sails.
[1] https://www.makemyhousegreen.com/green-guides/can-solar-pane...
Areas of the central valley are legendary for strong winds. A large stretch of the aqueduct (200km?) runs along the valley's West edge. So does the interstate highway I5.
The I5 has frequent high wind advisories. In the area around Pacheco Pass there are frequently gusting cross winds between 55 and 70km per hour. I use the I5 as my reference here, because I have spent many hours of my life driving it in these conditions.
> If your comment is true, wouldn't all warehouses using the same type of standard "bents" also be very expensive?
What makes you think building a warehouse in earthquake country is cheap?
> For all of the things I have read about large commercial solar panel installations, never once did I read anything about the risk of wind tearing off PV panels. If this were really a serious threat, wouldn't we see regularly local news stories about large PV panels "flying" away in big wind storms? And, yet, I never saw one.
The statement about solar panels making very good sails obviously true. Everything thin and flat makes a good sail.
PV panels don't go flying away because people spend a lot of money attaching them to the ground. They're expensive systems, and any installer that didn't make sure they were bolted down effectively, would be sued out of business after the first windstorm.
If you're on excavatable ground, the cost goes up a little (paradoxically, way more concrete is required to meet code).
There are also companies do this sort of thing with earth anchors/helical ground screws, which are VERY fast to install, but tend to cost more than the concrete. Nice that they can be (re)moved, though.
> The I5 has frequent high wind advisories. In the area around Pacheco Pass there are frequently gusting cross winds between 55 and 70km per hour. I use the I5 as my reference here, because I have spent many hours of my life driving it in these conditions.
My original post said that most panels with installation are good up to 140 mph (or 225 kmph). Your example is less than half my examplle.
> The statement about solar panels making very good sails obviously true.
I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.
Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?
Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?
Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?
In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.
14 gauge wire is basically all you need to carry 10A safely for an extended period of time regardless the voltage. It doesn't matter that you are carrying 120KW.
The proof of this is in EV charge cables. Those bad boys can carry up to 350kW. Yet the cables are often thinner than you might expect. How do they do this? It's by using high voltages (around 900V) which cuts back the amps to around 300->400.
Tesla's chargers peak (or used to) around 600V which has required them to have much beefier cables to handle the high current.
If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?
While having 12kV going through panels is not safe for many reasons, having 300V at 10-20A is completely normal.
12kV is impractical because these voltages can jump quite far, and you need a lot of insulation for them to be safe.
You would have short strings of panels and small string inverters built every ~100 meters along the channel. Inverters will also connect to the high-voltage bus cable, likely buried in a trench along the channel. And most channels in California are not gravity-fed, so they already need pump stations along the way and have power distribution systems for them.
And they're never installed in config chains that high voltage - cell spacing between cells is typically very low and only capable of withstanding ~5kV before internal arcing occurs.
Also, your typical 72-cell solar panel is only 32V.
The obvious answer is a cheap inverter ever few meters - this is typical practice with solar panels - and then a cheap transformer scattered around to get the voltage to whatever the line is. This is the common cheap practice for solar installs everywhere.
Microinverters where there is an inverter on every panel are also common - they are more expensive, but reduce some labor.
Either way the inverter is connected to a network and then get remote monitoring of each section and in turn can plan maintenance as needed.
Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals, so there it is a challenging cost-benefit balance. At least panels in parking lots and other developed spaces have the benefit of witnesses. I'm sure a 20 foot climb up a steel beam over running water is a decent deterrent as well.
First hand experience here - worked with a non-profit that has a tiny solar and battery installation for a light display, and we have had constant theft and vandalism problems with it. It's not even easy to get to - those meth-heads had to work to steal the lead acid batteries and copper wire...
not “do the right thing for society”.
I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.
You in a decent spot now?
We do. Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.
The problem will solve itself in a few weeks. Hang the fences, and the thieves will starve. It's both way easier to go after them, and they have something to lose if they don't follow the law.
How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?
How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?
Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?
There is a very strong link with higher prices for copper with more wire theft, as anyone would expect. You pay more for it you get more of it.
There is a strong link between lower fentanyl prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.
Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.
You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.
Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).
Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions (which make up the overwhelming, massive majority of legitimate trade in this space), but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.
> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs
Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.
What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.
I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.
I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.
FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.
- They are trivial to find, because they need a large, physical, business presence. This sort of trade doesn't happen under a highway overpass, or in an alley off 3rd.
- There are paper trails that point to them from any legitimate businesses upstream of them.
- Anyone lower in the criminal chain will happily flip on them.
Is argument over this an example of learned helplessness, a desire for society to do nothing and declare failure, or just arguing for the sake of contrarianism?
We have evidence of trying it with catalytic converters, and it worked. Catching every thief is hard. Catching one thief, and having them point to their fence is easy.
Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.
> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product
The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?
In my state, if you do, you can present your car title for the vehicle it came from to an auto dealer who can take it off your hands.
So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.
So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.
> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.
Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular problem, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.
This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.
> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.
They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?
And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.
I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.
I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.
Al is typically used for the large wires - the cost of the wires makes it worth the extra labor. For your typical house though the cost of labor is more than the wires, so Al is more expensive than copper.
It's a mix between culture and poverty. In high trust society much fewer people would consider taking that material fair.
Seems to me like the root cause is the illegality of the drugs. I hope you never have to deal with substance abuse problems yourself. You won’t like being on the dehumanizing end of the stick that you’re presently poking with.
If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.
Some drugs are genuinely dangerous. Many are addictive and will damage the quality of one's life, even if buying and using the drug isn't illegal. Normalizing addiction to drugs as a regular, normal, accepted part of everyday life is not the answer.
Keeping them illegal does not "protect" anyone and just creates more crime, death, and misery. You've swallowed the propaganda -- it was never about protecting people, it was designed for oppression and it's wildly successful at that.
Take a look at any video of police busting people for drugs: does it look like they're trying to help those poor innocent victims or are they gleefully enjoying their ability to completely fuck with those people in the name of "protecting" them?
The fact that drugs are still such a problem despite countless billions of dollars shows that it's never going to work in the way that they promise.
Drug addiction is a health issue, not a crime. My brother died of a heroin overdose and the law did not help him and the fact that the only resources public money went to were jails and prisons vs clinics shows where the priorities lie.
Feel free to read up on the truth of this matter: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/race...
But there was a world in which junkies existed when the junk wasn't criminal. People had serious addictions, but kept normal lives, because their addiction wasn't criminal. I'm not trying to solve addiction. I'm trying to end the criminality for substance abuse.
And to answer, no, buy your own booze. Cover your own debts, gambling or otherwise. Sex addiction is made up bullshit. I don't need to differentiate because I am not trying to solve that problem.
Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?
This can be done by going after suppliers.
There's non-trivial elements to this, otherwise we (I'm not American or in America, but many of the problems are broader) would have already done it.
Off the top of my head (and it will go much deeper): if all vendors are punished then the price remains high ("the iron law of prohibition") -> so you need the government to supply it to avoid dealers getting dollar signs in their eyes at the potential income -> the government must not promote it as part of this -> I'd say "medical prescriptions", but that's from a bias to my experience growing up in the UK where we don't have all the "talk to your doctor about ${pharmaceutical_brand}" ads I hear about in the USA -> would the USA even be able to pass laws preventing this, or is that a 1st Amendment problem?
Perhaps give the book “Chasing the Scream” a read. It is eye opening and respectfully, you seem to need that.
We do have a legitimate interest in making sure people don’t ever take that hit. BUT .. in the USA punishments take precedent over everything. Because we’re cunts from what I can tell.
I follow what you're saying, that the downsides of drug addiction outside of the user's own body is imposed by the people around them. I suppose that's almost definitionally true. I and many people do in fact find it unpleasant to be around people who are high out of their minds. I do not wish to associate with such people while they're in that state. I do not think that society would be better off with more of them, so I would prefer that society actively disincentivize such behavior. And you could certainly make the argument that this is the same thing as wanting punishment.
But if you're making the argument that being high on drugs might lead a user to job loss organically, I find that hard to believe. What if I didn't even know what heroin was, and saw that an employee was nodding off on the job? Wouldn't I be inclined to fire him?
On a purely human level we should all want to help someone like that. But we choose to turn a blind eye, criminalize their actions, break them further. Because it's uncomfortable right? To have to be a person and help someone else? Isn't it a lot easier to, say, throw them in jail?
I'm confused by your final statement. If you saw an employee nodding off on the job and ended up firing them, wouldn't that be job loss organically? I'm not sure how to respond to that? I don't think I'm making that argument though -- I'm saying it's possible to hold down some kinds of jobs while being a junkie. You're not running at full capacity but you can still do something -- so long as you aren't in jail.
I'll say this though: I am not against social consequences for drug addiction. You kinda need that to get clean? But it doesn't have to be criminal. It could be more like: when it's discovered you're using a drug, you're mandated to get it from the state while attending counseling, you have to check in with some state agency, etc. As opposed to: right to jail. Perhaps that's entirely too empathetic?
I come from a country with social healthcare, and here we also heavily subsidize drugs for people who need them because of their own lifestyle choices, e.g. diabetes medicine due to obesity. Why do people who have become addicted to psychoactive drugs not deserve the same compassion?
I am frankly appalled by the absence of compassion towards other people in this thread.
I don't think dangerous, addictive drugs should be legalized, or available to buy at pharmacies. People who traffic in these sorts of drugs should be jailed.
But possession and use should be decriminalized. People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.
Ultimately, a healthy society that actually takes care of the people who live in it will have fewer people getting into addictive drugs in the first place. That's a huge lift, though, unfortunately: fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way.
On food insecurity: the five states that are the least food-insecure are a swing state, two solid red states, and two solid blue states[0].
On housing insecurity: the states with the most affordable homes (median house price to median income ratio, or share of income spent on housing) are for the most part solid red states[1]. I would wager this is largely due to stronger private property rights in red states that make it easier for supply to rise to meet demand and establish a better-functioning rental market[2].
Let's not make the mistake of judging politicians and government programs by their stated intent and not their factual outcomes. Whether someone "wants to" fix society in one way or another is very, very far removed from whether it actually gets fixed under their leadership. Plenty of times in history, the problem actually got worse!
On income and wealth inequality: unfortunately, these things cannot be fixed except by fixing the fact that different people have different abilities, talents, preferences, and tastes, and some of those differences include the ability to make money and build wealth. Nobody would look at me and think I have an equal chance of making it in the NBA as, say, the guys in this picture[3], but for some reason we're supposed to believe that when it comes to the skills of moneymaking and wealth-building, anyone is about as good as anyone else.
[0]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/food...
[1]: https://www.affordabilityindex.org/rankings/states/, https://www.businessinsider.com/every-state-ranked-by-housin...
[2]: In parts of California, tenancy laws are so insane that it could take a landlord over a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to evict a nonpaying tenant. There's a whole cottage industry of landlords paying those same nonpaying tenants good money to just leave quietly. If you had property to rent, how much extra money would you charge to compensate for this risk?
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft#/media/File:NBA_Draf...
I agree with you, but it's worth spelling out exactly why. Philosophically, prison has one of three purposes: protecting society, rehabilitation, or punishment.
If the sentence for use is anything less than spending the rest of your life in jail, then society isn't really protected from addicts; the recidivist rate is too high. Get out, steal again for the next high, rinse and repeat through the revolving door.
Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts. Leaving aside drug smuggling into prisons, getting people past the withdrawal period is the "easy" part of rehab, the real work is in therapy, developing better relationship models, better boundaries, better strategies for the triggers that drove people to look for a high. It's very, very difficult to facilitate that in prison.
Finally, it's debatable whether prison is actually punishment for addicts. If they keep access to drugs through the people who smuggle them into prisons, and the prison pays for meals and a roof that were often lacking for the addict on the street, then, is it really a punishment?
IMO, prison makes it worse. Once an addict gets out, it is much harder to go back into regular society. Getting a job, etc., after prison is harder which leads to despair and back to drugs.
The major downsides are that the exposed wire is much less corrosion resistant underground (which is irrelevant) and that you need appropriate lugs. But standard lugs can easily be purchased in aluminum-compatible variants at no additional cost.
There was an issue with aluminum wire and terminations, the wiring devices and breakers used for copper only wire didn’t work with aluminum (wrong coefficient of expansion of the metal where the terminations were made) and caused arcing and fires. Once the termination points were made out of an alloy that worked with both Cu/Al, it’s been safe to use.
I agree with your general point, but be a bit careful here.
> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.
It’s true that, for a little over 50 years, the UL has regulated what devices may “accept” Al wire. But devices have had markings suggesting use of Al wire for longer than that, and it was quite unwise:
https://inspectapedia.com/aluminum/Aluminum_Wiring_Repair_CO...
Don’t get caught up in all the discussion of repair devices — AIUI this article is mostly about “repair” of old pre-8000-series Al wire. You can’t buy that stuff any more. As far as I know, modern Al listed building wire is only sold in 8 AWG and up, and this stuff doesn’t need “repair”: it’s perfectly fine in any appropriately listed connector.
I was taught that the safe way to keep using the old pre-8000 series wire is to use the specific listed fittings for this purpose (WAGO 221 series nuts are fit for purpose) with contact paste and a copper pigtail that connects to the device.
The cost of copper for house wiring is not significant (if it were, every spec home builder would be wiring houses with #12 gauge Al instead of #14 Cu) until you get into thicker gauge stuff, and that's almost always Al anyway.
Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?
I can only imagine why?
https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention
Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.
https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...
Happens a lot in Texas too.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...
What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?
> probably save money in the process
That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.
* Less crime because people who are addicted to drugs do not have to raise instant money for their next fix,
* Getting open, visible drug use off the streets and into a controlled supervised setting (this is not strictly part of safe supply though, but an orthogonal related service),
* Making drug use safer for the users by ensuring quality and consistent strength. Fentanyl, orphines and nitazenes are killing lots of people, and they exist on the market not because of demand from the users but because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture and smuggle than heroin.
* Making it easier to help the drug user by removing the burden and stress of obtaining the drugs. This is often an endless cycle of stress which leaves no room for getting help.
* Making it possible for drug users to be functional members of society. Not all people who are addicted to drugs need to stop, for some the safer choice is to accept that they are dependent and work around it. Taking opioids to prevent withdrawal is not incompatible with holding a job and contributing to society, committing crimes to get money for the next fix is. For many people who are addicted to opioids, abstinence programs are not the best option because the rate of falling back to using is very high, and once that happens the risk of fatal overdose is also very high due to decreased tolerance. I won't quote concrete numbers because I cannot remember them right now, but last I heard the rate of failure in abstinence programs was well above 70%.
* By supplying the drugs from sources that have no financial incentive in keeping the drug users on the drugs, you can ensure that users are exposed to all public offers to get help with their addiction or any underlying socioeconomic factors that are probably contributing to why they have become addicted in the first place.
Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate. I believe that to be true, and I think that a much better way is to address the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime. It doesn't mean that we should stop at the safe supply, because that would indeed be the cynical approach, we of course also have to help people overcome all the problems that are probably keeping them in their drug addiction, such as mental health issues and homelessness.
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
And dont think about any kind of social support net and caring for people that would be girly and a socialism. Can't have that.
The US has the highest large-country rate of incarceration in the world (besides likely North Korea, for which reliable data is not available); not sure what makes you think “more punishment” would be the way to go tbh.
Although to nitpick your examples... Can you really imagine a malice fueled crime that has to do with stealing copper from infrastructure? If you're angry but not desperate for money, there are more satisfying ways to express it.
And organized crime... That's for stealing Venezuelan oil tankers. If you're involved with organized crime and you're stealing copper from infrastructure, maybe you need to find a more ambitious boss because any junkie can do that. You don't even need to be organized about it.
I think the panels are safe if there's enough of a safety net that nobody's desperate
South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.
A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Drug addicts, however, have a hard time holding on to a house, apartment, etc and will often decide to exchange a stable living situation for another drug fix.
Giving houses to drug addicts means: - a non drug addict doesn’t get to get that house - the drug addict now has a house to use drugs in, not take care of, and generally destroy
The answer is for drug addicts to be placed in a rehab program until they aren’t an addict anymore.
The difference is in consistency in enforcement and general background crime rate.
If you have a nearly guaranteed chance of getting caught doing something, the punishment almost doesn't matter. If every single time you went over the speed limit you got a $500 fine 100% guaranteed, there would be effectively zero speeders ever. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting caught but the punishment is 10 years in prison - there will still be plenty of speeders all over the place.
Humans do not do well with estimating risk on low probability events. We are all just big children in the end. Consistency in consequences are what actually matters, not overly harsh punishment.
If they stop committing crimes either because they are still in jail or dead, the crime rate would absolutely drop.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement
Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.
That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.
1. Give people housing.
2. Give people housing.
3. Give people housing.
4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.
with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
That’s already been done in my area and really doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people are so antisocial they are difficult to house (causing fights with neighbours, burning buildings down and so forth). But yes, it does help to have both abundant inexpensive housing and also programs for people who can’t afford it.
It does have to be paired with police enforcement that doesn’t tolerate living on the street or in a park when housing is available.
It also becomes a problem when people who live in such housing abuse it, such as operating drug dealing out of it.
>4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
We tried that too. It’s great for people like me. Some people refuse to access mental health or addiction rehab services. So the access is there.
>5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
There is zero public support to give drug addicts extra cash to go buy more drugs.
Other than that, benefits are generous - I can say definitively nobody is going hungry. Some people will still refuse to apply for benefits. I stayed a few days in a hospital and my hospital roommate refused to apply for any benefits because he didn’t want to give the government info they could use to try to get the child support he owes. (The hospital sent a social worker in every few hours to try to persuade him.) Should such a person be given benefits including cash benefits?
>6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
We have that too. You need staff to clean them and it’s not fun to clean up after an antisocial person.
>7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
There is no public support for a heroin dispensary.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes. with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
Well, around here drugs are so cheap it’s not a big deal to pay for them. Now we just have loads of drug addicts who are strung out all the time, and in addition they can’t earn income with small time drug dealing like they used to. A fentanyl habit is cheap (maybe $10 a day) which is easily financed by selling eg your children’s food stamps card.
The public is not going to support the government paying people to shoot up drugs all day.
- Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?
- After setting up safeguards to enforce privacy protections, vastly increase the use of camera-based traffic enforcement. For example, create separate traffic enforcement agencies so that police don't have access to camera data. Use trajectcontroles (Dutch word for a system where multiple cameras on highway entrances/exits track your license plate and ensure your average speed was below the limit), cameras that detect texting while driving (pioneered by the UK), microphone-linked cameras in residential areas that detect modified exhausts (pioneered by Taiwan), and HOV-lane enforcement cameras. Keep traffic officers focused on ensuring that everyone has a valid/viewable license plate. The result should be a system where committing small traffic violations is not normalized.
- Reduce the punishments for most crimes. Large punishments are cruel, expensive to dole out, and less effective than consistent enforcement + small punishments.
- Set high expectations for police officers and create a culture of accountability. Fire those who are playing on their phones and arrest those who are committing crimes. You probably need independent oversight agencies to be able to do this.
- Make police highly visible - bright yellow high-vis vests and cars (pioneered by Antwerp) ensure that police are there to deter crime rather than hide and catch it.
- Provide actual public services so that people have a chance to succeed. A variety of unpleasant behaviors (e.g. public defecation, being disruptive/yelling in public, public drug use/intoxication) are things that no one wants to do - they are driven by a lack of, for example, homeless services, mental health services, and drug treatment services.
- Reprioritize enforcement (looking at you, drug task forces). Expand the legal definition of entrapment and stop doing so many B.S. sting operations.
Yeah bro, your average diseased junkie is definitely watching MSNBC and reading the WSJ in between rounds of fentanyl and shitting on the side walk.
Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on. That doesn’t do any good for people who refuse to use it. Sometimes a court orders someone to attend their mental health provider appointments, drug rehab, etc as terms of a sentence.
Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere. It turns out some drugs are actually bad.
As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?
Doesn't do anything unless you also get consistent about catching people
>Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on.
Really? If so, that's amazing. What state in the US has actually given all people access to mental health services and addiction help.
> Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere.
Fentanyl is a thing because strict enforcement necessitates drugs that are more compact/easier to hide. Many other countries still have heroine.
>As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?
I would suggest focusing on impounding vehicles rather than chasing people.
That doesn't mean you can force everyone who needs mental health services to go actually avail themselves of them.
You can't impound a vehicle without stopping the person driving it first. Most people don't use non visible plates anyway; they would first steal tags from another vehicle.
AI, not human, because the actual incidence rate for a lot of crimes is much much higher than most people realise, including for extremely severe cases:
• Statistically speaking I think it's something like most Americans commit three felonies per day*, but that's probably mostly drugs which IMO should be liberalised anyway.
• For an example of extremely serious crimes, and again statistically speaking, your first day in highschool, your first class on that day, you likely met someone who had been sexually assaulted by a family member.
Increasing a human police force to the scale needed to catch all crimes is theoretically possible (the Stasi basically operated at this scale even if they only thing they cared about was sedition) but is a terrible idea.
If all crimes keep their current penalties, a fully automated surveillance state bankrupts everyone almost immediately.
Note: I'm not suggesting this is a good future. I don't think it's a stable equilibrium, I think there's too high a risk of a leadership using such a surveillance capability to hold power, and they may even not care too much about non-state crimes once they do seize power, so this could easily become Stasi 2.0 or worse.
* Or the mean felonies per day is 3, which is a very different claim. I've not read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Silverglate
Human beings don't empathize well with situations nor people they never have to personally face. That's a well-lit path to fascism. We're one step closer to 1984.
The fourth amendment should really have been interpreted to cover this, but the courts have an unreasonable bias for giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt
She got arrested for that since the law requires it for domestic violence and turned out she had skipped bail for a grand theft auto conviction. She served 3 days then got released because the county jail was full.
Her conviction for domestic violence ended up being 6 days in another county jail.
She has since been running around committing more crimes, including stealing her children’s IDs, birth certificates, social security cards, and using them commit welfare benefits fraud. Police took a report and won’t go pick her up since it’s a nonviolent crime despite her violent history.
I’m not sure what’s needed (more police to say sorry, we can’t help you isn’t what’s needed), but having an antisocial person selling her children’s food benefits is not a good thing. Before anyone says she needs “services”, she already gets a guaranteed disability income, free housing, and her own food and free medical benefits including addiction rehab services.
That was sarcastic in case you couldn't tell.
Likewise people who abuse welfare benefit programmes and steal food from their own children in order to trade it for cash.
There is simply no excuse for that, period, and it doesn't help anyone to tolerate it or be lenient on it.
In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.
This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.
A general comparison of crimes in SK vs US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore...
Interestingly, embezzlement rate seems way higher in SK.
I think the difference in the gun murder rate reflects other legal differences, such as those around carrying and storing guns more than the level of ownership. If you have to go home and unlock a safe to get a gun it gives you lots of time to cool down.
That would be an interesting statistic in any country discussing number of jailed people, repeat crime, and jail time.
The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.
Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.
Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.
And, FWIW, SK's 25+0.5 per 100k suicide/homicide rate eclipses America's 15+5 (roughly). If you don't want to die a violent death at the hands of a human being, the US is safer than SK.
The reliability of incarceration data can also vary, but you didn't dismiss that. In fact, all data is unreliable, so should we just give up on comparisons entirely? Unless you have a specific reason to think US/SK numbers are wrong (and by how much - we're not giving up on comparisons over 1-10% errors, when the difference is 10x), what you've done is provided a fully generic counterargument: "well data isn't perfect, therefore I am right and you are wrong."
> Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.
Typical feigned intellectual helplessness. Knowing nothing else, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher. And we use homicide because it's harder to fudge - if I used crime in general, your complaint would have been over-policing or different definitions instead.
> Also, SK suicide rate
How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate? Especially when it's legal in both US and SK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation
>, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher.
Not at all. Different societies have different net values (e.g., violence as a political tool or as a means to some economic end) which will influence the deadliness of violence. So will the nature of the weapons that are available. It's reasonable to expect a trend, but lockstep is unreasonable, and you always have to question if perhaps the situation is unintuitive and higher homicide rates don't go hand-in-hand with higher crime rates for a particular example.
>How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate?
It isn't, but the incarceration rate was put forward to advance an argument about the relative virtue (and implicitly the relative safety and suitability for a dignified living) of American and SK societies. Suicide rate is relevant. Do you want to make it to your next birthday or not?
“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”
Friedman replied:
“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”
Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.
Or you can give poor people some sort of support so they don't have to ride in public transit just to have a place to sleep without being exposed to the elements?
> Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized.
Come to Europe. Sure, the truly rich still drive in SUVs, but in general, people of all backgrounds take public transit, and "gated communities" are not a thing here.
I find increasing evidence that we're heading the same way as migration is used in a way that creates an underclass and the previously homogenous high trust society dismantles ever so slowly as resource constraints (graying of the population) puts pressure.
Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.
> migration is used in a way that creates an underclass
The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.
Europe has been rather damn homogenous. The attempts to reframe that by putting a magnifying glass on the exceptions just end up standing out and sometimes being weird. It's also only ever people from more diverse cities who seem to think differently. Here in Belgium a rather damn urbanised country now i can get you a municipal census list from 300 years ago that just happens to feature almost all the same family names that i went to school with. This same census yields very different results if you go more west. One kid on that school was and looked african among hundreds. It is not the same today. At the next school i went to there were only 2 Russian kids and my generation already saw manifold more of this long distance migration than there once was. On the other hand in the bigger cities such as the capital there was more diversity but even there in living memory different parts still had different dialects tied into socioeconomics. Today it speaks mostly a different language, has different ethnic zones and belgians make up 20% or less of the population. Turns out this changes how people see it's funding.
yes there's exceptions in the balkans and among other ethnic borders but many people today wouldn't even call that diverse. Disregarding exceptions the average working class people were not quite as mobile. 32andme and the like would have been out of business from the start if that weren't the case. My grandmother cried when she took 2 busses for her first job. It was such a shocking distance to her and everyone she knew down her family line had been farmers in that area. She can also still describe ever old person in the wider area if not trough name then trough very extended family ties. We didn't have the language unifying drive of france and the netherlands so their dialects are all very very local.
The US has always been much more diverse and the people more mobile from my understanding but it's not like it did not have major demographic shifts either in places like new york.
>The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
There was an underclass but when there's no sectarianism and everyone essentially self identifies as the same "tribe" i dare say it's easier to tackle. From easier unionisation to no influx of distinct people without little generational wealth earning less on average and doing less attractive jobs by design. The US and anglo world in general actually do better on this front. Trough distance and other factors they attract wealthier, more educated and less religious migrants who more easily assimilate in a larger cultural sphere and in the case of the US can't really lean on a social safety net. Comparatively here there's muti generational issues.
>Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.
What? I can see, have a memory and there's plenty of demographic data?
Hell the original comment that got my one line response is particularly contrasting: Most of our new cars are SUV's and crossovers now. There's now a more easily visible demographic difference in who uses which mode of transportation. (we have a company car system so incentivise car use for the upper middle class too whilst the poor can get cheaper or free public transport) It should be no suprise then that public transport is very gradually getting less coverage as it's being defunded whilst there's an entire growing issue with violence towards personel. Whilst gated communities are indeed not a thing i'd dispute that we don't have an equivalent among the richest. Go to Knokke or the south of Brussels,etc
Yes.
But California.
In addition, they’re all eligible for government food assistance which is quite generous. In my experience, though, many people sell off their food benefits for drugs. So that’s a problem.
Communism did not distribute food benefit cards that functioned like cash that could be used in lieu of cash at any store that sold food.
I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it
This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).
Been happening occasionally for at least a decade.
And still has a yearly 6 to 8 million euro in damages from copper thieves just on the rail system alone. And that doesn't include economic damages from people being late for work.
And the social systems don't reach everyone, in part thanks to 20+ years of conservative governments. People can't find jobs, if they're entitled to one (i.e. are nationalized) they can apply for government subsidies, but those come with strict conditions including a requirement to apply to jobs on the regular (and provide evidence, and you get cut on your subsidies if you don't).
On paper it still looks good ish, but in practice it sucks if you're in the system. Health care is becoming unaffordable (creeping to 200/month just for the insurance, plus 375 or so copay which the new government wants to increase even further, which means poor people will avoid seeking health support because who can afford up to 375 on top of 200 / month, and that's not even the essentials?)
Healthcare is already income based in The Netherlands. I used to pay €5000 a year as a high earner. My neighbor paid €0 per year as he didn't have a job. If poor people avoid seeking healthcare over cost they are doing things very wrong as they can seek financial help and get it.
Also I think it is good that you need to actively look for a new job in order to get unemployment benefits. It's a safety net not a hammock.
We are just lucky that this horrible drug isn't as accessible here as it is in Cali.
BTW recently I spent eight hours in a stopped train because a family of career criminals decided to steal cables from the railway. They didn't even escape, they were immediately caught with their loot, but the damage was done and thousands were stranded on the main rail corridor in Moravia deep into the night. I was home at 3 AM instead of 7 PM.
There is no treatment for this sort of stupidity where people do damage to themselves and to everyone else because of a really bad judgment.
My friend was in prison for causing a serious road accident. Some six months. When he came back, he commented that most of the repeat offenders are just stupid as f*ck, unable to put two and two together, getting repeatedly caught over crimes done impulsively and without due preparation.
It's sobering to think we've not made much inroads into giving addicts a better perspective (or getting "preemptive" messaging across) in all that time.
I'd argue there is; why do people steal stuff? Because it's easier and more profitable than jobs they can do. What's the solution? Meaningful employment for everyone. People generally don't steal if they earn a living wage that doesn't kill them. (some still would because they get a kick out of it though but there's therapy available for them if they want to change)
UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.
I would not put the one-time covid cheques on par with the various rigorous UBI and/or free housing experiments that have been run over the last 30 years
Free housing is just another form of UBS that I was talking about.
And BI would be attacked for the latter - some ingrateful on-basic-income person committing vandalism for no financial benefit. It's the "workhouse"/"treadmill" argument - supposedly boredom breeds crime and people must be made to work, even pointless or below-poverty tasks, else the streets get taken over by criminals or worse.
Like tourists taking over the country.
Arguments acknowledging (and steering / manipulating) feelings weigh stronger here than economic facts, alas.
There's no financial gain in that. Doing this won't get you healthcare (we've got socialized healthcare anyway, and it's pretty much free for "the poor"), won't help you eat. It's just stupid, antisocial people. How would giving them money help any of that?
You seem to believe that everyone wants to work. I don't think this is a given.
You also seem to believe that people who steal are just trying to make ends meet. Quite a lot of thiefs are addicts who steal to feed their drug habit. Given the cost of drugs in the street, unless they have really good jobs (and can keep them even when taking drugs), they will resort to stealing just to be able to buy their fix.
Another great example are the “open air” transit systems in Germany, Poland, etc. where you can freely enter trams and buses, with inspectors patrolling infrequently to check if you bought a ticket. That kind of system would absolutely never work in America, no one would pay, and the ticket inspectors would be hated as some kind of secret police.
This is exactly how Seattle's light rail worked for years. You could just walk on and off, and I saw an inspector maybe 1-in-10 trips at best
So, it's hard to make a direct comparison of fare compliance before and after the "COVID times" however you define the time period, as the are very different transit systems that now serve a different geographical area and population. But fare compliance has recovered from 56% during the peak of COVID to 63% in 2025, and 2026 numbers are not out yet.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sea...
"Comparing the six month period before the 'next generation' fare gates debuted, to the six months that followed, Embarcadero station saw a significant reduction in the need for maintenance work — from 112 hours to two hours. "
...
"When you see how dramatically these maintenance requests fell, the numbers tell us that these fare gates are preventing unwanted behavior that impacts the station environment," BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told the Chronicle. "Those people are no longer entering BART."
https://www.transittalent.com/articles/index.cfm?story=BARTs...
Seattle has become a low trust society.
Of course, there's a case that the Seattle Times itself is a source of low-quality information.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/seattle-grocery-crime-p...
"One million dollars will be set aside for the theft and upgrades, which are backed by Seattle Police crime data that is helping determine which stores get the funding."
https://bottomline.seattle.gov/2026/09/20/mayor-katie-b-wils...
https://www.kuow.org/food/2026-09-18/seattle-launches-plan-t...
"Supermarkets experiencing high theft will be provided one-time security and facility upgrades."
Theft rings are pretty common in bad neighborhoods throughout north american cities. The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.
And here is some data counter to your thesis https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on... It seems to me that Seattle is an especially high trust society by US standards (largely due to high income I suspect), and the things you're pointing at are evidence of the opposite of your thesis - more likely to be symptoms of high trust than low trust.
> The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.
Grocery stores in Seattle are shutting down, and looting is a major contributing factor to it.
I'm open to the claim that looting -> grocery store shutdowns, especially in bad areas, I just dispute it being "rampant" based on my lived experience, and I dispute that there's a causal link instead of correlation with a low income/low traffic/low staffing death spiral. I did not feel your source adequately supported this claim, and what you say here is a walked back claim from "rampant" to at least one store? I am not convinced Seattle has it worse than other metros (similar things happen where I live in California in bad areas too, and it's been shown to be stores that were underperforming and due to be closed regardless of looting), and I am not convinced this supports your thesis that Seattle has become a low trust society against my counter evidence from Pew.
Now go to a bank in downtown Seattle. The tellers are behind thick bulletproof glass.
Me and my fellow commuters know snd like our conductors.
Society is going backwards in rapid pace I’m afraid.
The "refugee bus line" is a single ferrying route between a rather awkwardly-placed arrival center and its nearest train station. The main issues were caused by refugees being unable or unwilling to pay the bus fare, and considering all of those refugees are living off an allowance anyways, having the arrival center itself pay for the buses and making them "free" really is a no-brainer solution.
Segregating refugees onto their own bus because they are aggressive is what South Africa did during apartheid. Even the United States isn't doing that anymore. It is a disgrace. Just give the refugees a card that you load with €50 every month. You can automate that and they can pay for the bus with that card.
And no, it is not a single route. I guess you are referring to the Ter Apel to Emmen line. That is indeed one of the segregated bus lines. There is also the line from the DISA building to the night shelter. There are taxi services for underage refugees. There is arranged bus transport between locations.
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/07/13/extra...
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/site/binaries/site-content/coll...
And as someone that’s ridden the bus in LA many times: the culture of acceptable behavior there is infinitely lower than the typical Central European bus.
To be fair I did have NYC in mind when writing the comment though, and I should have looked into west coast systems more.
I find it interesting to see how often criticisms are leveled at the US confidently based on ignorance.
However, I wouldn't be so confident about Portland's working well:
> The transit agency has identified a significant increase in fare evasion, prompting the introduction of new technology to control access at train stations...The report said TriMet has the third highest amount of fare evaders in the country, trailing only San Diego and Los Angeles.
https://katu.com/news/local/trimet-considers-adding-gates-to...
There was a time when the downtown area was fareless. The main argument in favor of ending it was that fares provided an enforcement mechanism for keeping undesirables (read: homeless) off the train. That is the main opposition argument, as well, from communities on the edge of the metro area who do not want any lines extended to them.
In the uk rail industry we have people stealing copper all the time. They cut a live cable, attach it to the back of a truck and drive off. Sometimes this can yield them kms of cable.
We also had issues where people would jump over fences into depots, use scaffold boards to build a ramp over the 2.5m fence, and then use forklifts to roll big reels of cable up the ramps and over the fence on to the back of a waiting truck the other side.
Copper cable theft is 100% a massive issue in the UK.
The elephant in the room is naming the group almost exclusively responsible for this crime.
But do tell, what do you think is the group and what do you think should happen?
Or maybe him: https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/cable-thief-ja...
"Almost exclusively" would seem to point in a very home-grown direction.
So who gets to decide the definition of 'punching up'? When is it ok for me to be prejudice towards a group of people?
Im looking forward to learning where the line is so I can feel safe in my bigotry /s.
Don't be a dick.
If you're being a dick, you're at fault, if you're not being a dick, you get a pass.
Its a shame the meaning of language is subjective, or we could all happily live under this banner forevermore.
When a group acts as a coordinated group. A political party for instance. This is not rocket science. You must link the individual(s) directly to the act, or you’re just stereotyping and making assumptions.
You are asking a lot of baiting questions. We know this isn't an attempt at dialogue, so just state your mind and be done with it instead of continuing of this silly bread crumb game man.
The Economy - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/trump-somalis...
Affordability - https://www.pbs.org/video/trump-s-message-1765403127/
Crime - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/29/trumps-hate-...
Benefits - https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/10/24/fact-check-tru...
Of course Donald Trump isnt going to blame rich white men for anything, he is one!
The rest of your response can be answered in your own words: Oh there are clauses and exceptions to prejudice are there?
EDITED
I didnt think any sensible person would take the word everybody to mean literally every single person in existence. If I could go back and edit the post now I would happily change the word 'everybody' into 'lots of people' to satisfy the semantic pedants.
I dont think I have the energy to correct a random on the internet about exactly what my opinion is, other than to say I very much dont blame rich white men for anything and no I dont think there are exceptions to prejudice. But thats it, you can have the last word I'm out.
So, lots and lots of people are blaming immigrants for all our problems. I'm not sure rich white men need you to defend them to a random on the internet, they are doing just fine.
When someone says "everyone and their dog", they don't mean that the dogs are also participating.
Basically you failed to charitably interpret the person you are responding to and are now insisting on a reinterpretation that makes you look silly.
I mean think about what he wrote before that. "I look forward to", he is talking about the future in a sarcastic tone so the president being a counter example is his point. You're pinning him down onto the present and that is a strategic mistake.
I don't really view internet comments as "strategic" like you. I was simply clarifying that this person's world (social media, news, friends, etc.) may give them the impression that "everybody" is blaming this group, but in reality that isn't true.
I am assuming that your point is that prejudice is ok to some type of group but not other, but I am inferring that from your answer. Feel free to correct me.
That's a bad inference. I was explaining the distinction that seems to be confusing the issue.
> Care to give some examples of what you consider to be coordinated groups, functional groups, and abstract groups?
You understand plain English well enough.
Someone who doesn't know what arbitrary or abstract means, or has trouble with context, I'm sure it can seem confusing.
Who are these people making up evidence about %vulnerable groups% and what are they saying?
Criminals should be locked up in jail.
People may or may not find it interesting to research the history of this phrase and what it replaced.
What are you going to suggest next? Hot lunches for kids and a justice system focused on reform?
There is a part of California that still has ancient telegraph lines complete with weathered copper with the blueish colour. Nobody has come by to scrap it yet. So it’s really a matter of proximity to wherever antisocial people choose to live.
Bet you if copper price suddenly went up 10x, those ancient telegraph lines would disappear very quickly, one way or another (turns out, "criminals" and "junkies" and "entrepreneurs" are driven by similar incentives, they just sit at different points of the cost/risk tradeoff spectrum).
Are we going to discover that, by some striking surprise, antisocial people choose to live in places with weaker social support?
I mean, this is pretty solvable if the political will was there to upzone large areas of low-density housing around the Bay and LA...
The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.
When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
If low density is the crucial factor in determining desirability, why aren't Manhattan apartments basically free and tiny houses in rural Montana being sold for tens of millions?
Did you commute into the Bay?
Because by my count, Stockton to SF or Stockton to Menlo Park is a 3-hours/day commute. 3 hours/day on the highway may be surviving, but it sure as shit isn't living (just in case anyone from outside the US thinks this is an extreme outlier, I worked with a number of QA folks in the Bay who had commutes this bad, or worse)
I made about half as much as my co-workers (I was contract) but I took home more due to the difference in living expenses. Also, I had a house instead of an apartment.
Now, decades later, I have no desire to be anywhere "trendy" or "hip". I want affordability, stability, space, and quiet.
Sometimes it feels like they are well funded but the people running the programs live in a (very expensive) dream world that has no connection to the actual need.
I think a lot of people don’t realize you can go 2-2.5 hours out side of SF and be in CA MAGA country.
40% is not “near half” - it’s closer to 33% than it is 50% and I think we would both (rightfully) object to me saying “near 1/3rd.” 50% and 40% are very different numbers.
Also, that 40% figure is based on their own definition, not something that is broadly accepted.
California has social services. They are not sufficient for the scale of the problem. On top of this there's little incentive for states to build out full social nets when there's open borders between states. This is a job for the federal government and nothing else will be sufficient.
A huge part of the train lines are fairly isolated, and there's an easily-available schedule of when people (trains) will be there - often even with real-time GPS tracking. And there's a lot of wiring buried there.
Its actually not just junkies, you get organized criminals who are stripping solar assets of $ value items.
Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out? There's not that many telecoms engineers and if they spend tons of time removing the old, that slows down the new.
Spain's rollout is up in the last few percentage points (>95%) of fibre coverage, in this particular region we reached saturation of the entire rural area 5 years ago.
Plenty of time for those disconnected copper cables to go walkabout if anyone were so inclined. Realistically, in a region where the population skews older and most everyone owns property, it's probably not worth the risk to fence it
Joking aside, I'm not sure that metal thefts can totally be blamed on addiction.
I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.
They would do things like hack phone cables from telephone polls, attach them to an SUV and attempt to rip them out of the ground, with varying levels of success.
A week later the same people would break into a works yard in another part of the country after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found in a field somewhere after they'd used petrol to burn the casing off.
I don't think the people involved were doing it for want of housing, healthcare or addiction treatment, as we have all of that in the UK. They just saw it as a source of money.
Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.
Yeah, that seems like a pretty reasonable solution, all things considered
I cannot imagine which entities you could possibly be alluding to;)
>Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.
No, you don't understand, it's free healthcare and housing they really need.
Seriously, I remember it being an epidemic about 13 years ago or so, I wondered what happened. Banning people from buying stolen metal is such an obvious step that I wonder how the UK government ever thought of it.
Not a serious argument, but an argument.
It's that recycling has a smaller carbon footprint than making new copper from scratch. I think this claim is true for copper, recycling v. manufacturing.
At the very least this would increase cash flow in your economy. The cash flow coming from junkies and their newly acquired "free" copper are better off and more likely to spend some of their money on goods other than dope.
Also not a serious argument, but an argument.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
The poorest Americans do actually have free healthcare (medicaid). It currently covers 40% of all children in the US and generally covers the bottom 25% of Americans. In places like California and New York the state level benefits are even better and apply regardless of immigration status (illegals get free healthcare).
Free addiction care: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/free
Most Americans live in a state that has excellent free addiction care, especially in the major population centers like California and New York.
Housing via emergency housing and subsidized section 8 housing:
https://www.usa.gov/emergency-housing
https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/housing-choice-voucher...
Heck they even get free/cheap subsidized cell phones and internet service: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/
This is factually incorrect. The USA hasn't been "90% white" since the 1950s (and even then, you have to count hispanic as white to make the numbers work). It is also still >50% white by pretty much any definition (the 50% claim is based only on children under 18, and requires excluding hispanic from the category).
That is, if I'm being incredibly generous, 75 years (nearly 4 generations) to go from ~90% to ~50%. Not one generation.
These make the problem worse, rather than better, by enabling.
Junkies get a free apartment from the city, free food, free healthcare, free clothes... and now have unlimited free time to go scam cash for a fix.
Free taxpayer-funded rehab? Exists, but almost none take it. That would reduce their drugs time. Forcing treatment would be cruel and oppressive, according to the left. So the cycle continues.
They may hide the bitemark, but this future has a been biten. Its going to turn.
And I mostly introduce this issue as a contrast to panels on developed land like the canals, which serve other functions and are less likely to have the risks associated with such a single-purpose site.
https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/antelope-valley-solar-ranc...
(Only sort of joking)
No because now you're using land that could be used for other things, which is exactly what this avoids. This takes existing land that loses water and costs money, and makes it lose less water and make money.
You just typically don’t notice it because unless the panel is severely damaged, a non-functional panel doesn’t look much different than a functional one.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energ...
As the earth moves the sun would only hit one side and lose efficiency but right now it's "free space" not being used otherwise
They even make flexible solar panels now that can bend and move with the wind and don't need a stiff frame, slightly less efficient but volume makes up for that
Clean them the same way automated window washers work on skyscrapers
Shame they never came up with the solar paint solution, yet
The best explanation I've heard is from a PV installer. He said, "Every try to get a suntan standing up?" Seems you lose too much sun exposure to make it worthwhile.
I didn't try to get a suntan, but I have gotten tans while standing up. It's called working outdoors (and not properly covering up, which I'm paying for now).
That said, the economics of vertical installations have changed. The cost of panels keeps going down, and as it does it's starting to make sense depending on your location and how you're orienting your vertical panels. Remember, almost all solar panel installations will be suboptimal unless they include a mechanism for tracking the sun. The question is how bad is suboptimal, what's the cost of the panels and what's their energy yield?
I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.
Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.
Lighting, incidentally, is practically _free_ these days. An EU 'A' rated LED bulb has to do 210 lumens per watt. So the equiv of an old-fashioned 100W incandescent uses 7.5W.
Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.
But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.
Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?
That aint' gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel. And don't even think about fabric shade sail types of things, nobody is going to want to replace those every 3 years.
>it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.
This is not something you can just ignore
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the people who worked on this project must be stupid".
That being said, solar panels are not that heavy, and fabric is every bit as subject to wind loading as solar panels.
Almost all the fields in the area is being used for valuable crops. It would be difficult to harvest them if solar panels were installed.
The wind on the valley side of the coastal range is intense. A cheap shade will need considerable maintenance.
There is little chance two separate projects would be cheaper than a combined project.
https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar. As of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA
Is this enough solar? Just keep building. Enough sunlight falls on Earth every ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...
They paved paradise, put up a solar array.
The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.
They're load-bearing.
Yeah sure, let’s put solar panels over the last section in Bakersfield where all the canals merge. More power, less evaporation. That’s great! But it’s not going to move the needle in California.
* if you go backpacking in the Sierras you’ll often run into one of the canals. They’re both cool and scary. It takes hours to get to them and every time I see one i have to wonder how they managed to build it (it’s been decades so any construction damage has mostly grown over)
They look like ordinary “bents” for prefabricated metal buildings which are about the cheapest kind of building per square foot. Made out of steel, they are typically sold at a cost per ton like other steel shapes.
The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.
So I agree it is a dumb idea but not because of the cost of steel but for the lack of modularity and abundance of inaccessibility.
Cherry pickers like they’re used for every other type of infrastructure.
In this case, it is a ton to the side, and only a little above. And the cherry picker would be on dirt, which is not a very stable platform
Not going to work.
Almost anything is possible with enough money.
I suspect this is cheaper than many projects just because the work is consistent - once you have the canals covered you keep a crew around to repair/replace them. That is you will need one crew full time within 2 hours of some small town so you hire someone who is willing to live in that small town (they get to go home to their family every night unlike the construction crew above working in a different city every year)
Jordan Harris, once a Virgin Records executive who had a hand in turning acts like Paula Abdul and The Smashing Pumpkins into household names, now serves as co-founder and CEO of Solar Aquagrid. He says the $20 million Project Nexus has done much more than serve as simple proof of concept.
https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...
And keep in mind all that reach is over live electrical panels.
I don't know the details of their plan, but I wouldn't design the reach over live electrical panels myself. The obvious thing is not lift individual panels, it is to lift a whole string of panels already wired up and connected to the frame.You have somebody on each end (which is on land) to put the bolts in, connect the last wires (which are live, but nothing electricians don't work on live all the time). Even if the worst disaster happens - nobody is ever under something falling and the live wires fall to the ground without harming anyone.
The above is not difficult. Well there are a few more details that need to be figured out, but they all fit in the above plan and are obvious to anyone who has been in construction.
Because cranes are expensive crane operators are expensive and crane insurance is high (because cranes kill people), crane companies only work economically because crane companies can stay busy.
But when you rent, your schedule is dependent on every other crane customer’s schedule. You get a crane only when one is available and odds are you are not the crane company’s best customer nor the customer with the deepest pockets to pay priority service rates.
In my AEC experience cranes get “surprisingly bigger” as horizontal reach increases…levers work that way. By “surprisingly bigger” I mean without actual experience with crane tables…my first AEC job involved cranes and prestressed concrete in a business culture where employees had been killed with cranes. And I spent time in the yard where driveable gantries were handling big chunks of concrete “overhead”…by “overhead” I mean you could wind up under twenty kips if you weren’t careful and Carl didn’t know you were there.
There are enough canals in CA that I would expect to be an important customer of the cranes. You don't get a crane on demand, but you can always plan such that when you get the crane there is plenty of work.
My comment way up thread criticized serviceability.
Electrical infrastructure needs to be serviceable during disaster recovery. You can plan for it can’t schedule for it.
And the worst time to need a crane is for disaster recovery.
Yes, you can just use a crane but “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Similarly, for a system like this, I would expect they would build in components, let's call them racks of panels, however many that are connected together. If one of these so-called racks fails, leave it up until whenever and then replace the whole thing.
Possibly you'd have to remove a bunch of panels from the canal if the support's collapsed, but you should be designing them for the highest possible wind roll, but so that's unlikely to happen. Well, earthquakes are a problem, and I'm not sure how much you can design for that, but once again, you design for that. In any case, if something happens in a disaster, well, you may have to remove some panels from the water, but that's a labor job that needs a little bit of safety training. But otherwise, no crane. You just remove it and throw it away. You come back with the cranes later to repair the system back to where it should be. I'd be thinking using a tow truck for disaster recovery, not a crane.
Their capacity is sized for peak demand.
Their infrastructure is financed through bonds.
Alphabet is an advertising company.
No. Lots of voltage (potential) but current only if you tap it. Panels will charge to a slightly high voltage state but do not become a problem.
As a way to save water, maybe. But it makes no sense as a way to make electricity. Someone else did the math, and it was approx $10/watt, which is silly.
The large scale members usually mean there is less labor cost and mobilization time, and hence overhead (insurance, fencing, trailer, etc.). Like I said pre-engineered metal buildings are about the cheapest cost per square foot you can get at scale.
No commercial solar farms use large members to save on labor costs.
Standard ground mount equipment also uses pre-engineered metal, just of much lighter weight due to supporting a small fraction of the load.
Incidentally, they are not “I beams” and technically I-Beams are Wide Flange Shapes and used vertically as well as horizontally, and designated with as W(n)x(m) where W means wide flange, n is the depth in inches, and m is the weight in pounds per lineal foot. W shapes are rolled in rolling mills.
Bents are fabricated from steel plates to a design specific to the structure.
I'd also expect that they have a crew to wash them off once in a while (I'm guessing yearly), but this is cheap labor not electricians.
> The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.
Ground mounted panels can be serviced from a bucket truck right after a hail storm or other disaster. Disaster recovery is a critical design criterion for electrical infrastructure and the bucket truck is the standard electric utility service vehicle. Electrical utilities depend on each other and dispatch their fleets of bucket trucks across the country to aid in disaster recovery. If you drive much across the country, you might come across convoys of bucket trucks deploying down an interstate.
Which is to say cherry pickers don’t easily scale to handle the kind of critical events that need to be handled with electric utility infrastructure (and as an aside, in a pinch ground mounted solar panels can probably be serviced from a half ton pickup).
For context, in a former life I was an architect and one of my clients was an electrical co-operative. I also know a lineman socially.
You can read more about this project and the players in this article and draw your own conclusions:
https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...
Sure, it can be done, but strictly from the PV perspective it doesn't make any economic sense compared to a regular solar farm when there's still plenty of land available. Similarly, from a "preventing evaporation" perspective going for a plain corrugated metal roof might not be much cheaper in installation, but it will be significantly easier to maintain.
Just because two thing can technically be combined, doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
Your comment, which I found at the top of the stack here, did not survive the first pass of that scrutiny.
> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field,
Yeah, sounds nice. But the desert surrounding popular parts of California does have natural life. It has life whether it is owned by someone (who can make a stand to say "No"), or it is owned by the public. The life there doesn't know.
But that desert life, even when it it seems insignificant, still needs light in order for it to survive. It has a very narrow ecosystem in which it can survive.
> and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?
This is what a cheap shade over an artificial canal tends to look like when it is meant to survive the elements. (This particular shade under discussion just happens to also to produce electricity from solar energy.)
> The supports in the picture are massive
As they would also be for a shade
> and don't look cheap.
None of these activities are ever cheap.
> Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field.
It's good that you can imagine things. Some people are not so-blessed.
> You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.
Oh. So, you caught everyone with their pants down! So clever. Big Copper should be very ashamed of themselves right now because, by way of your plan, the gigantic expense of copper for a large solar farm has been increased to a slightly-larger expense! The entire ploy to cover the canals was a sham all along that was motivated by selling more copper!
Please, tell me: Would you want to receive the Nobel prize directly, or would you rather be seclusive and receive it by proxy?
> Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper.
You're free to spearhead a movement to do that yourself, if you're so-inclined.
And hey! When you do, then at least some of the water supply canals will be already covered! That hard part will have already been done. Win-win!
There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.
Not if you already own the canal but would have to buy or rent the fields.
Plus the people selling it to you will simply play you off each other since you're publicly committed to buying it. Like with that train they're building.
If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.
Tarp is about the only opaque covering I've found that's cheaper than PV, per square meter.
However, even for a balcony PV system the frame is about 25% the price of the panel, and balcony systems are tiny frames; I don't want to even guess about those huge steel I-beams and concrete pads. For big things like this, the cost of the frame is unlikely to go away because you need to care about wind load.
That really leaves maintenance costs (how often do you need to replace the tarp?) and revenue (PV makes money, a tarp does not).
Tarp, and pitch it across the canal like how you might do a hammock - you just need two anchor points on each side (or 4, at most).
Sunshade material could be more like 5-8 years, but is significantly more expensive.
Shouldn't the obvious solution be to fix the "permitting requirements" rather than spend 6x on building kn undeveloped land?
Should the purpose of laws to serve the people rather than to tiptoe around laws and claiming "be we have strict zoning laws"?
Why is there a law that you yourself call "insane"?
In the Southwest for example (eg NM, AZ), you have plenty of desert and sunshine-hours. Solar panels also tend to get less effective the hotter it is so it's a balancing act. But those states should be plastered with solar and they should be exporting it to neighbouring states. Colorado is actually kind of ideal for this too. In that case, it's mountainous terrain.
Also, IMHO there shouldn't be a parking lot in the country that isn't covered in solar. But that's a separate issue.
Unless you can provide concrete numbers and do a side-by-side comparison, you have already lost the argument.
Plus I am sure you are not the first person to come up with the idea.
Additional plus: cars don't heat up in the sun. And at some point you might even charge EVs there.
Solutions are easy, money exists, political will doesn't
The key to all this though is that fossil fuels exist to induce demand for weapons. Once you realize that it all makes (depressing) sense.
Citations:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/population-demography/pue...
https://apnews.com/article/puerto-rico-trump-us-solar-energy...
https://apnews.com/article/puerto-rico-blackout-power-outage...
https://welcome.topuertorico.org/stories/water-crisis.shtml
https://www.accuweather.com/en/climate/what-you-need-to-know...
It is unfortunate, I am not unsympathetic, but unless tens of billions of dollars drops out of the sky for these folks, trajectories hold as they are. With US debt exceeding $40T, the deficit being $1T-$2T/year, and no will to increase taxes for the foreseeable future, “it is what it is.” Plane tickets and moving expense reimbursements are comparatively cheap.
Is it better if we do nothing while also not offering an option to leave for a potentially better life? If these folks prefer to remain with inadequate, intermittent infrastructure for the remainder of their lives, that is a choice. These people deserve better, but help at the levels needed isn’t coming for the foreseeable future, if ever.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/puerto-rico-us-territory-c...
https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2021/05/25/a-new-... (2021)
> Rodríguez is one of the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have left the island in the last decade, a migration propelled by an economic crisis and a string of natural disasters that have devastated Puerto Rico in recent years.
> “We love Puerto Rico. It’s our country. However, objectively speaking, we need to recognize that it’s a country in deterioration and at a political crossroads. If it doesn’t come out of it, things could get much worse,” she said.
> The island’s population declined 11.8 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whose results are used to determine billions of dollars in public funding. Demographers say that steady migration, coupled with a declining birth rate that’s lower than the death rate, is creating a “demographic crisis” that will fundamentally alter Puerto Rico’s society, economy and culture, as family structures change and there are fewer workers to pay for government services.
> “It will literally be another world, another society. It’s not only that there will be fewer people, it’s that the structure completely changes. It’s a complete transformation,” said Hernando Mattei, a demography professor at the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.
62% is pretty respectable for the size of California (same electricity consumption as Spain). I did not know this.
this part of the claim is carrying a ton of weight here... Zero-carbon sources could include carbon dependent sources with paper offsets.
Nuclear 9.92%
Large Hydro 11.06%
Biomass 1.94%
Geothermal 4.60%
Small Hydro 1.52%
Solar 21.30%
Wind 11.89%
[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
One can even potentially pyrolize the biomass and get biochar, giving up some energy but making it carbon negative power source.
Not correct. Biomass includes burning wood from new growth forests. If the trees were kept in the ground they would be carbon sinks rather than carbon stores, therefore the overall effect is an increase in emissions. Furthermore, there's energy expended in prepping the wood (e.g. turning the trees into wood pellets ready to burn) and in transporting the wood to the biomass power station.
I was shocked when I saw how much batteries contribute, honestly don't hear about them much but they have scaled a lot in recent years.
Flattening the Duck Curve: batteries reach 44% of evening demand in California - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633698 - April 2026 (5 comments)
A large part of the Capex of renewables is land costs - which are high, but once you have the land you keep it. This cost is generally all financed as part of the initial build, so in 30 years everything is paid for - but you have to finance to replace only the renewables while keeping the land and so the second round is a lot cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
So why not plant the trees?
Redoing swimming pools due to close by trees seems to be quite common construction work job.
What? France has had to shut down or down rate nuclear power plants because of a lack of cooling water.
There'd be some cost reduction from scaling up, but 10x is a huge gap to close. This is a waste of money.
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.
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.
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...
The Hoover Dam was also a sort of jobs program similarly.
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?
Its also not comparing against utility projects because it isn't utility scale.
It's a) just a trial, and b) not just generating power so that cost isn't factoring in the other benefits.
[1] https://www.autonocion.com/us/arizona-solar-panels-irrigatio...
It's just good manners to give credit where it's due.
Well I guess I won't be reading your article then.
The way so many web sites are now banning whole parts of the world is killing the Internet.
Build Soil has some interesting threads on this:
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3lmeddjd...
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3mkzybkk...
(note: I'm not trying to totally bash the solar panel project nor some of the key figures involved who've done great work like Dustin Mulvaney, but do think we should think about how we ended up here)
In searching YouTube history for it, I see I also stumbled across this project too: Why Aqueduct Solar Solves 2 MASSIVE Problems https://youtu.be/EVBacmPfQ6E (about 9 minutes in it gets into the engineering challenges mentioned else comment about wind loads and such).
- Pistachio Wars film - https://pistachiowars.com which talks about the changes in water use and canal development
- the original article 'A Journey through Oligarch Valley' from 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20151115054847/https://www.nsfwc...
On November 5, 1913, tens of thousands of people climbed these hills to watch the first water arrive. When the gates finally opened, water trickled through, but that trickle quickly became a torrent. The project’s chief engineer, William Mulholland, leaned over to the mayor and shouted the line that’s been repeated ever since: “There it is, Mr. Mayor. Take it!”
That moment was profound for a lot of reasons, depending on where you live and how you feel about water rights. LA didn’t become LA by living within the limits of its local resources. Its meteoric growth into the metropolis we know was enabled by an early and extraordinary decision to reach far beyond its own watershed and pull a whole new river into town. Today, roughly a third of LA’s water comes from the Eastern Sierra through the Los Angeles Aqueduct system. That share swings with snowpack, drought, and environmental constraints, but this one piece of infrastructure helped turn a water-limited town into a world city. It’s one of the most impressive and controversial engineering projects in American history.
But it many ways, it was not only unscrupulous, but also short-sighted. Residents of the Owens Valley watched ranchland and farmland dry up as the water that had shaped their home was rerouted south. Native communities saw their homeland transformed with access to gathering areas disrupted, places made unrecognizable, and cultural ties strained by changes they didn’t choose. Wind picked up alkaline dust from dried lakebeds. Habitats were disrupted, and the birds that depended on these waters and wetlands lost part of what made this migration corridor work. It’s easy to see why the aqueduct remains controversial, and why what we sometimes dismiss as “red tape” around major infrastructure is often completely justified due diligence. As engineers, and really, as humans, we have to try and account for costs that don’t show up on a balance sheet, but can come back later as decades of lawsuits, mitigation, and restoration.
Every plant built would give us a much needed buffer and in the good times could even let us refill ground water (we'd never do that, I know).
That's true of basically all of the West and the Colorado River, too.
And yes, I do get the point that if you suggested we build $6B desalination plants to grow lettuce people would balk and say, "That's not worth the money!". We should use less water on crops.
But there's a million environmental restoration projects we could be doing right now to increase the water holding capacities of our environments that are simply not being sufficiently funded. The science is pretty well done on most of these strategies while desalination of ocean water is still mostly an experimental technology that is not economically viable.
I made a very clear distinction there between brackish water and ocean water.
There's lots of sites on oceans that are making water for fractions of a cent per gallon. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minjur_Seawater_Desalination_P...
We just literally don't have the technology yet. It takes an immense amount of electricity/energy to desalinate ocean water which is way more saline than brackish water. The other half of the cost is in the very high rate of corrosion of equipment.
I'm not against desalination of oceanwater. I absolutely support funding more research into it. I'm just explaining the current state of technology. It just doesn't currently exist.
You seem to have advanced knowledge that is contrary to ~everyone else. It would be helpful if you would simply state 2 numbers. First, what you think it costs, and second, what you think an economically viable cost would be.
The Dead Sea is disappearing because the freshwater that flows into it keeps getting diverted for other uses.
They are however, in talks with Jordan about piping water into the Dead Sea, and there is a similar operation for the Galilee.
There are however various salt mining operations around Dead sea using brine. That is, both in Israel, and less extensive in Jordan.
Good questions I guess but what more specifically are you saying would happen if we delete the canals? What does "the water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated" mean?
Presumably deleting the canals means water will still be relatively scarce and the distribution will simply by different and not controlled by the state.
Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.
>“What Turlock is doing with their projects is very impressive, but we have a different-looking canal system going through our service area,” Allen said. They are looking to put their canals into pipes to avoid evaporation, instead.
Umm, if you can completely enclose it in a pipe then why in the heck couldn't you put an 8-10' tall roof over it?
Typical local government (and I worked for one): "We didn't do it that way when I got here and it sounds like a lot of work and will be a change so let's rationalize doing nothing"
Theres a very narrow balance where canals covered in solar panels make sense.
It needs to have enough evaporation that its a problem, but not enough where it justifies piping it.
That's a very narrow market, and so unlikely to be scalable or prevalent.
Personally i don't think this makes much sense, it's not like there is no room to place solar panels, and the added costs of putting it over water makes it not as efficient. I suppose the main benefit is easy access to water for cleaning (which can then be dumped back into the canal).
There are resovoirs in California with millions of black rubber shade balls floating on the surface to reduce evaporation. There's no reason why we shouldn't be doing this everywhere.
Australia is leading the world in rooftop solar adoption. By June 2025, 4.2 million rooftop solar systems had been installed nationwide representing 26.8 gigawatts of clean power generation capacity connected directly to local electricity networks that serve homes and businesses.
“In the evenings homes typically consume power, which flows from large power generation plants, such as wind farms, hydroelectric, coal and gas-fired power plants. Let’s call this the ‘low-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation,” he said.
“In the middle of a sunny day, however, today about 40% of Australian homes generate their own power from rooftop solar panels. When the rooftop solar generation exceeds the power consumption in the houses, the excess power is ‘exported’, flowing back to the grid, supplying other homes and beyond. Let’s call this the ‘high-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation.”
Grids are useful to balance out sources and sinks, make battery farms economical at scale. You do need smarter grids to deal with phase imbalances.
Are there risks of heavy metal and tire contaminates from vehicles leaking into the water system over time?
Are there risks of dust blown contamination from the megatons of shit humans leave everywhere we go leaking into the water system?
The answer is everything has risks, the risks from solar panels are unbelievably tiny in relation to all other pollution sources and I have to deal with a bunch of redneck solar panel haters that have bought in to massively overblown risks around them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
The concern is not completely unwarranted:
> Because over-canal systems are subject to a more humid environment than ground-mounted systems, over-canal PV panels might have increased reliability problems45. In tropical conditions, the water content in the encapsulant can exceed solubility, which can lead to the formation of droplets of water in the modules, sometimes causing corrosion or other problems
But overall "field experiments have shown that CdTe semiconductors can withstand hot and humid environments."
Of course, if a solar panel is broken, ground up and falls into a canal, it would put some heavy metals into the water.
The risk is basically zero and far lower than any other power generation source. It is a nonsense, bad faith "concern".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41893-021-00693-8
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
Well moving to sustainable energy is good, but California being on 100% clean electricity won't have any measurable effect on its warming.
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.firstsolar.com/Solutions/Recycling
> One kilogram of First Solar’s semiconductor material can be recycled 41 times over, which translates into a use time of more than 1,200 years.
A minor point anyways. Glass is not exactly a precious resource.
The most valuable parts are obviously the silver (about 50% of a panel's scrap value despite being 0.1% by weight), aluminum (about 20% of value), silicon (about 15%), and copper wiring (about 10%).
We are only just beginning to figure out techniques to reclaim the silver using thermal heating and chemical leaching techniques
Maybe we dont want birds nesting and pooping in the canal.
But I would be interested to see how a solar panel covering compares economically to some other, cheaper setup.
There's a cost to pipes, but at least part of that would be offset by the structural support for the solar panels and the fact that you need to pipe less waters. Also I assume that the canals are lined in some way. I don't know, maybe the canals are just prettier to look at?
A similar problem is plaguing the Aral sea. The Amu Darya river is being drained by ineffective and leaky canals.
Building a solar roof is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper, and the pipes wouldn't generate electricity.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/were-u-s...
Is the suggestion here that there is some heat transfer from the panels to the water? If so doesn't that introduce a different sort of problem?
The 1.6 MW number is the nameplate capacity of the panels. That is not the actual peak generation capacity for this system (or any other system). This is due to the panels not having optimal alignment to sun rays. For example, in Los Angeles, once your array is facing directly south, you need to tilt it to about 35 degrees. The array in question has panels almost facing straight up and possibly tilted away from sun rays. They will experience a significant drop in peak output at various times in the year. My guess is they'd be lucky if they peak out at 1 MW during the best possible conditions.
So, you have a 1 MW array that cost $20 million. That's $20 per Watt. A traditional ground mount solar array costs about $1 per Watt, maybe $1.50. So, they took something that would cost $1 million and turned it into $20 million.
There does not appear to be any information whatsoever about ongoing maintenance, service and operating contracts. That would be useful information to have.
The good news is that it appears they did not have to run new high voltage power lines to connect to the array. That is unlikely to be the case for a much more extensive installation, which means that the cost of bringing high voltage power lines to the array would have to be added to that $20/Watt figure.
Wait. There's more.
One of the claims being made is that the shading helps save a million dollars a year in canal maintenance. That's fantastic! This also means that we must evaluate the cost of shading the canal using other technologies.
I had a quick look at solutions. It appears that tensioned fabric shading would run about $3 million per mile.
Solar would cost about $60 million per mile, maybe less, maybe more.
Yet, the story does not end there. What would the operations and maintenance costs be over, say 25 years?
The estimate I got was about $1.5 million for tensioned fabric (replacement and disposal) and almost $7 million for solar (replacement and disposal).
Now multiply that by, say, 50 or 100 miles...
The Verdict:
Wholesale electric prices in California vary, but a utility like TID can typically buy or generate clean energy elsewhere on the open market for 5¢ to 9¢ per kWh.
Paying a 31.2¢ per kWh structural premium means that without massive, permanent government subsidies or a dramatic 70%+ reduction in structural costs, the solar canal is a massive financial loser compared to a simple fabric shade structure.
The maintenance overhead and structural complexity of suspending high-voltage power over water completely swallows the value of the electricity it creates.
I imagine with cells in that configuration, lifting wind loads are significant which is why it's overbuilt like that.
Perhaps some laminate timber for the cross supports?
Lastly, the US has got to start eating seasonally. The water problem in the southwest is all agriculture: people want to grow baby spinach in January. Unless we figure out a way to create a crap ton of energy cheaply so we can supply industrial sized flows without worrying about the energy cost, we use far more water than we should in California and Arizona.
> The duo went on to start Solar Aquagrid, an advocacy firm dedicated to reimagining aging canals, and partnered with the Turlock Irrigation District, UC Merced and the California Department of Water Resources to cover small sections of Turlock’s canals with solar panels. The new “solar canal” provides shade to limit evaporation and generates power all in one neat package. They call it Project Nexus, and it operates at the intersection of the state’s need for clean water and energy.
> ...
> 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.”
> When it comes to algae, the panels helped. “Last year when we drained the canal at the end of the irrigation season, there was a physical line on the sun side of the canal that had algae growth and then not algae growth from where the shade was,” Weimer said.
That it's green energy and can help supply the power demand is a bonus.
While I agree those steel supports are large, that seems insanely wrong to me, but not an expert so curious if someone with more info could comment.
So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.
Just a nit, that should be:
A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% of its original effiency.
A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]
So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.
Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.
Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.
A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-do...
[2] https://www.cahomesolar.com/feeds/blog/solar-panel-energy-pr...
[3] https://www.mascotsteel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/st...
Yo! Wake up sheep! Solar and wind energy are the two cheapest and least polluting ways we have of producing energy!
(Also, in the US, "solar panels take more energy to make than they produce" is a popular, although entirely false, talking point in right-wing media, so propaganda plays a part too. This claim has also been made about wind, and, bafflingly, _nuclear_.)
Along with their perennial favourite, "EV batteries are more polluting than fossil fuels"
Fair. But the almonds and alfalfa would like a word, especially since the alfalfa is shipped around the world for others to consume in some way.
So while it's definitely agriculture as a serious source, it's not just the US as the driver of that source.
The proper solution would be to have the farmers pay for the externalities somehow so that they are priced into the decision to consume a-seasonal products
No thanks
> The new “solar canal” provides shade to limit evaporation and generates power all in one neat package. They call it Project Nexus, and it operates at the intersection of the state’s need for clean water and energy.