As water restrictions hit farmers, solar is making sense
California’s Central Valley is one of the country’s richest farming regions, blessed with fertile soils, sunny days and a massive man-made system of irrigation canals and reservoirs. But as climate change intensifies, droughts deepen, and water restrictions kick in, growers in much of the valley are getting less water for their fields.They also face new limits on how much they can pump from underground, forcing them to leave hundreds of thousands of acres dry in the coming years. Some are turning to an answer they never thought they’d embrace: solar. … Farmers’ desperation coincides with California’s solar dreams. The state is legally mandated to reach 100% clean electricity by 2045. That will require an additional 10 gigawatts of clean energy a year and between 0.5 and 1.3 million acres of in-state solar development.
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