Solar panels on water canals seem like a no-brainer. So why aren't they widespread?
The idea of putting solar panels on top of the world's thousands of miles of irrigation canals has long seemed like a good one.
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Slips, trips and falls are definitely a massive risk anywhere. That's often the main killer in the workplace. However, I said falling in, as in falling into water - if you fall and injure yourself it's going to be much worse if you need to swim.
Yes, like I already said, they can find solutions for these problems. However these solutions are going to have to be invented and will incur a significant cost. No one wants to be the first to do this, they're all waiting to see what everyone else does, so they can copy it for less expense.
Also, cleaning is rarely an automated process. In my experience they typically hire the land owner to drive alongside the panels with his tractor and a big angled scrubber on the back - over waterways would require a more specialist solution, which again would cost more.
Source: work in HV on solar farms, among other places.
I just do not understand why falling risk is only a deal breaker for working a few feet above water, and not shit like wind turbines or rooftop solar, or any of the crazy amounts of high up places where electrical maintenance is done. I've done electrical work too and would love to work this close to the ground. If it's any amount of fall risk I can tether, but this is just stretching too far to make something sound dangerous, do you just avoid pools in general?
I didn't say it was a deal breaker, only that it was worse than working on land, eg a solar farm in a field. Working at heights is also a risk, and working at heights above water is even greater than that. As for the significance of working at heights on land vs working on or near water, really a hypothetical comparison there is moot - at that point, you should be considering the specific circumstances for your risk assessment.
At the end of the day, it's unusual and a greater risk than other work. So people are more likely to charge more for it. However the bigger costs will probably be whatever specialist equipment will need to be developed to clean the panels quickly, as well as mitigations for situations where live cables fall into the water, or even just the equipment you use to clean falling in and needing to be repaired or replaced. Again, none of this is insurmountable, but it very apparently puts off risk-averse developers (and/or the venture capitalists that finance them). If it didn't, they'd have already done it by now.
Tell me you've gone to proposals for rooftop solar and denounced it as being too hard to clean due to risk of falling
It's more time consuming and expensive to clean than a land owner with his tractor driving along the ground.
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