DeJong also offered a diagnosis in the same statement, and it is the most quietly devastating compliment in the entire file. “USACE is a very unique federal agency and is very methodical,” he said.<\/p>\n
Methodical is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.<\/p>\n The Casa Blanca array runs 2,782 linear feet, a little over half a mile, with roughly 2,556 panels. Nameplate capacity is 1.31 megawatts. Reclamation expects at least 2.26 million kilowatt-hours<\/a> a year out of it.<\/p>\n Set that against what the irrigation district actually burns and the scale lands properly. DeJong told Canary Media<\/a> the district spends around $3 million a year on the 27 million kilowatt-hours it needs to pump, move and store water. Casa Blanca covers roughly eight percent of that load.<\/p>\n The hardware is not a standard solar farm on stilts. Ben Lepley, founder of Tucson engineering firm Tectonicus, designed a modular prefabricated truss that spans the canal without putting anything in the water, so flow and maintenance access stay clear.<\/p>\n The array ties into the local distribution grid every 1,000 feet, which works out to roughly every megawatt. That modular unit is precisely why Phase I is 1,000 feet and 1 megawatt. It is one block.<\/p>\n Lepley has been blunt about the economics. Capital cost for canal solar runs roughly twice that of ground-mounted solar, because of the steel and the foundations needed to hold panels above moving water.<\/p>\n It is the same problem that forces a 52-megawatt array on a Houston landfill<\/a> to hold 140-mph Gulf winds down with concrete ballast instead of driven piles. When you cannot put a post in the ground, the structure gets expensive fast.<\/p>\n Run the two Gila River projects against each other and a second variable shows up.<\/p>\n Same tribe, same canal network, same engineering firm involved in the design work. The Corps-run phase came in around 55 percent higher per megawatt and fourteen months later.<\/p>\n The Corps job did carry conditions the other one did not. It was the first project under the Los Angeles District’s Tribal Partnership Program to reach active construction, and project manager Robert Savage said the district deliberately sought a tribally owned contractor, landing on Numunu, a Comanche Nation-owned company. First-of-its-kind federal work is slower by design. Knowing why it costs more does not make it cost less.<\/p>\n This is where solar canal coverage usually gets oversold, so here are the actual figures.<\/p>\n DeJong has estimated the Casa Blanca array keeps somewhere in the range of 8 to 12 acre-feet of water in the system per year. An acre-foot is about 325,851 gallons. Call it enough to irrigate a couple of acres.<\/p>\n That is not a Colorado River fix. It is a proof of concept, and the people running it have never claimed otherwise.<\/p>\n The oversell already happened once, from the federal side. Reclamation told ABC15<\/a> that the project would conserve more than eight million acre-feet a year, and the Arizona Department of Water Resources said afterward that the bureau had misspoken. Eight million acre-feet is in the neighborhood of the entire annual allocation of the Colorado River. The real figure is about a millionth of that.<\/p>\n Evaporation percentages float around too, and most of them are projections rather than measurements. DeJong has put the expected reduction at 50 percent or better. Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said in October 2024 that the panels were cutting evaporation by almost half.<\/p>\n The honest answer is that no verified season-long figure has been published, because the study is still running. Interior built a five-year monitoring period into the grant<\/a> when it announced the money in December 2023. That clock started with the array, which puts a defensible number somewhere near the end of the decade.<\/p>\n California’s Project Nexus arrays near Modesto<\/a> are running their own instrumented study on a different canal, in a different climate, with different geometry. Those two data sets are the entire American evidence base right now.<\/p>\n On March 4, 2026, the Arizona Corporation Commission voted unanimously to repeal the Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff<\/a>, the rules adopted in 2006 requiring regulated utilities to source 15 percent of their power from renewables by 2025. The commission’s position was that utilities had already cleared the bar and that customers had paid more than $2 billion in surcharges getting there.<\/p>\n REST never applied to the Gila River Indian Community. Its utility authority is tribal and sits outside the commission’s jurisdiction. But it tells you what the surrounding market looks like now.<\/p>\n The federal money was a one-off too. The Inflation Reduction Act set aside $25 million total for putting solar over water conveyance infrastructure. Casa Blanca took $5.65 million of it, with the rest going to irrigation districts in California, Oregon and Utah. There is no standing program behind it.<\/p>\n Lepley’s read, given to Canary Media in September 2025, is that the model survives anyway. “We have a pretty good playbook of how to continue these projects going forward, even without any grant funding from the federal government,” he said.<\/p>\n The community is testing that with its own money. DeJong said in September 2025 that a third array over the Santan Canal and a floating installation on one of the community’s reservoirs were both self-funded and slated for early 2026, which would put the community at roughly 4 megawatts across all four systems. No public confirmation that either has been energized has surfaced since.<\/p>\n Interior’s grant documents describe the community’s ambition to eventually run panels over 18.5 miles of canal. DeJong has said 16 miles of the Casa Blanca alone would save around 360 acre-feet a year and carry about 26 megawatts.<\/p>\n That is the number worth tracking, and half a mile is a long way from it. Water infrastructure keeps turning out to be decent solar real estate, whether that is a canal in the Sonoran Desert or 4,872 panels bolted to the face of a Swiss dam<\/a>, because the land is already owned, already disturbed and already wired.<\/p>\n What Arizona has proved so far is narrower and more useful than the press releases suggested. The trusses hold over moving water. The panels produce. The permitting is survivable, and a tribal utility can now build these without waiting on anyone.<\/p>\n And based on the only two American data points that exist, the fastest way to get one built is apparently not to route it through the Army.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Putting solar panels over an irrigation canal is one of those ideas that sounds too tidy to be true. Shade … <\/p>\n![\"Casa](\"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Casa-Blanca-Canal-solar-Gila-River-tectonicus-1024x576.jpg\")
What is actually bolted over the water<\/h2>\n
Canal solar costs about double, and the paperwork costs more than that<\/h2>\n
\n
The water math is smaller than the headlines, and nobody has the final number<\/h2>\n
Arizona deleted the rule that would have rewarded any of this<\/h2>\n
Half a mile is not the target<\/h2>\n