India has already developed an exciting and intelligent way to reduce the amount of land that needs to be devoted for solar farms: it has started to cover irrigation canals with solar panels.

The only purpose of the irrigation canals is to transport irrigation water to fields. Covering them with photovoltaic panels is a perfect way of acquiring land for energy production without compromising its other uses.

Even more importantly, covering irrigation canals with solar panels benefits agriculture by reducing evaporation of water from the canals.  The panels shadow the canals effectively and thus reduce the temperature of the water. This reduces evaporation, in a most significant way.

Besides this much of the water that does evaporate from the canals during night condenses in the lower surfaces of the solar panels and then falls back to the canal as drops of water. The water condensing on the panels heats them during the night, but when the same water evaporates during the day, when the panels are producing electricity, it cools the panels and increases their production.

India alone has 300,000 kilometre's or 300 million meters of irrigation canals and the global total is likely to be more than a million kilometre's, enough for installing perhaps 500 – 1,000 GW of photovoltaic panels. *Illustrative image.