GILA RIVER COMMUNITY, AZ — The Gila River Indian Community continues to look for ways to conserve its water supply, and it may have found a way that’s the first of its kind in the country.
As part of the Biden Administration’s “Investing in America” agenda, more than $5 million will go towards constructing, installing, and covering parts of the Casa Blanca Canal with solar panels.
Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said it's an innovative and historic project.
"This is really our approach moving forward,” he said. “We were sort of envisioning a blue-green economy.”
The idea of installing solar panels over canals has been around for years, but turning the idea into a groundbreaking project in the Western Hemisphere hadn’t been done before until now.
Michael Connor, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, said it’s the right dynamics on the energy side as well as the water side.
"It's just all come together with respect to the different types of irrigation canals that the Community has, the magnitude that they have, and their desire to have that clean energy,” said Connor.
There are two different phases of the project that the Gila River Indian Community is taking part in.
The first phase, with the assistance of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will cover 1,000 feet of the I-10 Level Top Canal near the Phoenix Premium Outlets south of Chandler.
The second phase, with the assistance of the Bureau of Reclamation, will cover more than half a mile of the Casa Blanca Canal near I-10 in Pinal County. It’s set to be completed in 2025, but the long-term goal is to cover more than fifteen miles of the Casa Blanca Canal.
The Bureau of Reclamation originally told ABC15 that the project would conserve more than eight million acre-feet of water per year. The Arizona Department of Water Resources has since said that the bureau misspoke.
According to David DeJong, the Gila River Indian Community's director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, the Casa Blanca Solar over Canal project will conserve an estimated 10-12 acre-feet of water per year.
"If we cover all 16 miles we estimate the water savings at about 9000 acre-feet over the 25 years life expectancy," DeJong told ABC15.
Governor Lewis said it’ll provide a blueprint to other native communities and potentially SRP and CAP on how to go about the pioneering endeavor.
“We’re going to look back on this time; we’re going to look back on this project as really being the first of hopefully many other innovative projects that are going to come from this example,” he stated.
