The board of California’s largest agricultural water district approved a master plan Tuesday to convert over a quarter of the land in its service area into solar farms, a sign that Central Valley growers are looking for new business as their water sources dry up. The board of the Westlands Water District approved the plan to develop 136,000 acres on the west side of the Central Valley into solar farms, complete with new transmission lines and substations at a Tuesday morning meeting in Fresno. The new master plan, called the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan, would allow for the development of up to 20 gigawatts of new solar farms, which taken together would be the largest solar installation in the world.

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