Some combos are beneficial for the plants bellow. Either way, any solar plant is better than coal.
Parking lots are already wasted space—might as well make them useful too.
I have explanation, but you will not like it.
Parking lots have been built on cheap. Those who have roofs can’t support any added weight, while those who do not have roofs are far away from any serious electrical connection able to give the energy outside.
The whole idea can be done… on new parking lots.
Also - how about instead we build more water-plant power storage? They pump water to the upper reservoir using electricity in the middle of day, and then produce electricity from flowing water at dawn/dusk/night. This would up the demand for electricity when solar panels are overproducing it and push businesses to consider including solar panels in their constructions.
The benefit of pavement being cheap is it’s not terribly expensive to remove or repair bits of it. Cut a square out, drill down with an auger, chuck a sonotube in and pour a footing. Trenching in conduit for power lines doesn’t seem like much of a deal breaker either.
I’d also image a parking lot is closer to an electrical connection than a farm field out in the country.
Okay, I give on the first part, but not on the second.
Farms consume quite a lot of electricity actually, and often electrical grid must be enforced more for a farm than for a suburbs.
Ones on roofs are easy, a panel can’t weigh more than a car so you lose a few parking spaces on the roof level and bob’s your uncle. The goal is to reduce car usage so it’s fine. And existing ones are too far away to provide electricity? What? They’re literally beside stores which consume power! Yea I don’t like that answer, it’s dumb as hell.
The pumping idea sounds cool, though, and I’m not against it, but dude I’m so tired of “what if we do nothing because we can’t understand the concept of having multiple solutions going at once?”
Pumped storage can only be feasibly used on existing suitable terrain, and we used most of the easy location.
There is not much left, and with cheap battery storage and power to gas you can go way cheaper. Hydro power and storage is not the future.
Why not both?
From the agricultural perspective- we’ve got billions to feed and that isn’t going to go away. Better ways to use the land we’ve turned into fields is a different subject, but between plant’s need for solar and how they’re harvested it’s a no go. Wind capture is an option though.
For what’s left of our wild spaces- we’ve already fucked so many. Solar may be a lower impact on what remains but there’s millions of acres that have already been converted for our “needs”. We should focus on generating our power in the areas already developed before talking about dropping more manmade structures in the wild.
It’s often mutually beneficial for animals to graze around solar panels. Having them in fields is not inherently wasting the space.
That’s why I referenced plants, not animals. Also, don’t fool yourself. The bulk of your meat is not grazing in a field even if the packaging label makes it look that way. It’s knee deep in shit-mud and shoulder to shoulder with it’s kin in a CAFO or tearing up the native vegetation on the public lands out west.
I’m a farmer, rancher, and dairyman. This shit pisses me off. You can get dual use out of land. I can grow crops and graze cattle around and often under solar panels. The limiting factor is what the power company will allow me to sell to them. And they don’t want that because bottom lines.
Seriously. The oil industry has been extracting petrochemicals from the earth while we utilize the land above for animals and crops for over a hundred years. Its not difficult. Saying that renewables are using up our land and not allowing dual utilization for other commodities is a lazy and piss poor lie that will not stop and I’m tired of it.
Stop this nonsense bullshit petro propaganda now. Alternative energy can and already does coexist with modern land management and modern farming practices. Full stop.
Farming under the panels can be beneficial in drought conditions.
Putting solar panels above parking lots is still an excellent idea.
Why not both?
Panels on grazing areas and some fields has repeatedly been proven beneficial
THIS !!!
As a solar engineer myself that started in utility scale solar and just left their first Commercial & Industrial (C&I) solar job, residential, commercial, and industrial solar is the best use.
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you center generation as close as possible to utilization, minimizing transmission and distribution.
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land is re-used, allowing other lands for other uses like rewilding, reforesting, and conservation.
You still have other problems like large power users, but you cannot ignore the benefits.
I hate that this even came to my mind, but I bet a significant percentage of people would actually be discouraged by point 2. I’m all in on it, go team save (and restore) the environment, but it seems like so many people sneer and get turned off just by hearing words such as “rewilding” as if it’s somehow working against their best interests
To the capitalist, everything is an asset that can make money, including land. No money making in returning land to nature, unless a positive externality is introduced by a tax credit or something. Not a perfect solution by far, but rewilding is a necessary pill to swallow because we’re in the sixth mass extinction and are using land for things like cows and pigs which is super water and fertilizer intensive.
Land is their favourite asset because all they have to do own it and charge you for the privilege of being there.
As a side note, landlords are a disease
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Dont cover our car parks. Cover our public transit stations…oh wait. There are none. (USA)
I totally agree and I’ve been saying this for a little while. But get this, since there are plenty of unused grassy properties out there in America, there’s somewhere they’re making deals with sheep heard owners where the sheep are regularly brought over to the property to eat grass around and under the solar panels. Apparently trying to keep the grass cleaned up and not overgrowing the panels is a problem because of all the little nooks and crannies, getting mowing done under and around them as a pain in the ass. But the sheep can just come in there get a free meal and do the job perfectly well. It’s win-win.
Here in the West they’re just covering up all the desert areas that are not being used anyways. And they also bring in livestock of various kinds to take care of a lot of the weeds and keep it cleaned up as well. I think it’s a great use of space since there is so much of it in such wide abundance of sun. There’s also quite a few of the car parks here that have been installing solar panels over the cars and that’s a great use as well but that’s also quite a huge expense overall.
Desert areas can still have rich ecosystems that get severely affected by solar farms.
Someone said to me yesterday, why don’t we redirect the Ord River (WAus) down to Kalgoorlie (also WA) and irrigate and farm the desert. Some real-life Fremen mind at work there. My eyes rolled so hard, the “its desert, nothing lives there”, is strong with that one.
Oh I know, I’ve spent my life here. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea.
sheep wouldnt exist without humanity. its also -like all other bred animal races with similar situations- serious damage for their bones to carry 10kg’s of extra fur(bred to be wooly).
So no, this is not a win-win
Not a win because it’s not vegan? Most people don’t share your beliefs.
Most people are happy to use the animals we have spent thousands of years making useful
I see this as a win/win/win - the sheep farmer gets rent for the land the panels are on, the weeds are kept down by the sheep, we get clean electricity, we get wool
Ed. “Animal races” the word is species, races is for the variation in humans, or in fantasy it’s the humanoid species
I suppose it would be reasonable to talk about races of sheep to talk about all the different types of sheep
Breeds. When is animals they’re different breeds. Interestingly there’s fewer differences between human ethnicities than between different animal breeds
Among humans I have heard that there is more variety within human races than between them
Music says we’re the whole human race
even for non-vegan people the climate impact of sheep farming should be concerning.
Some plants are shade loving and would do great under properly spaced panels
That’s call Agrivoltaics. Strawberries are a prime example.
Solar farms in desert areas contribute to China’s renewable energy capacity while also helping to stabilize the landscape. The shade provided by the solar panels reduces the harsh impact of the sun on the soil, creating more favorable conditions for vegetation to grow. In some instances, grass has started to grow beneath the panels, which aids in reducing soil erosion and supporting the local ecosystem.
It’s good for the animals too, since they have a shelter for weather.
Just cover all fields used to grow biofuel crops with solar panels, it’s an insane number used for biofuels - like enough to power the whole US twice over if they were all covered in solar.
Its is nearly always a transmission bottlenecks that hinders these. How to get all tbat power out of rural areas.
What if - now hear me out - we built more power lines?
Yeah absolutely, no one is saying that isnt an option. But when you capture the production as a single build or consideration simply needing the effort you dont account for the costs of infrastructure to hundreds and thousands of sites and quickly you will see that a lot of these sites are not going to produce enough for it to be a viable option.
There is load of oil in the ground that we dont take out because it isnt a good investment. This is the same.
Repurpose combines to drive over the solar panels and harvest the energy. Then pile it up in giant piles near rail roads. From there train it to depots for distribution. Infrastructure is already there!
This guy solar farms!
Yes, i’ll mention him (and another trigger after the ~1h mark warning for dipshits).
I don’t think it is intentional on OP’s part, but this is really well-disguised fossil fuel propaganda. Carport solar is way more expensive than ground-mounted, and it isn’t viable for utility-scale projects. Should we do carport solar? Absolutely! But we also really need utility scale solar.
And if you put it on marginal farm land and make the ground cover pollinator-friendly, it actually improves yields on nearby farms without any real loss, since that land wasn’t great for growing food anyway. (Not to mention that cropland is about the furthest thing from a natural ecosystem)
many also put them on pasture land, the grass grows just fine under it, and the animals get some shade to hang out in
Only problem is many pasture animals are not compatible with agrovoltaics. Cows tends to rub on the supports and may chew any exposed wires, goats will find their way on top of the panels no matter what you do, pigs will chew on any exposed wire or insulation, and sheep, well they’re actually okay for agrovoltaics.
There’s the alternate approach of basically using solar panels as fences which might work better for some pastures. Ultimately agrovoltaics is one of those combinations of factors that is going to take time and experimentation to perfect
Any time I’ve seen PV panels in a pasture field, they’re all set up a little differently depending on the field, animals, etc.
The ones with cattle look closer to the ones in the parking lot in the post photo, they’re way up on a post, all the wiring is either kept up high or are in a metal conduit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them with goats though. Goats are assholes.
Large herbivores like cows are going to be capable of damaging traditional solar installations. But this would be great for goats and sheep and stuff.
Chickens would be fine, but you’d have to clip their wings (not surgically) so they can’t fly up on them.
Cattle pastures usually just mount the panels higher up, and put safety cages around service panels and electrical conduit.
The most I’ve seen with chickens is just a couple panels on the roof of the coop, or barn for industrial sized chicken processing. (I’m not going to call it farming, it’s basically a factory)
I have always been puzzled about why raising chicks is farming instead of ranching.
But I was meaning damage to the supports if the livestock was allowed close enough to benefit from the shade. Although the risk with chickens is getting the panels dirty or damaging them.
or have some kind of replaceable film for removing the shit easy
I’m not too up to date on solar panel materials engineering, but another concern would be them pecking at the panels or their claws scratching/cracking the existing cover.
I think it’s unreasonable to say it’s fossil fuel propaganda. I like having shade and coverage in a car parking lot.
It’s not that the solar covering is just for solar power, but it’s a convenient pitch to combine the use cases where sure, solar covering parking is more expensive than solar straight on the ground, and sure, a plain covering is cheaper than a solar covering, but right now the lots are uncovered bits of asphalt that could be better.
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This is propaganda. It is intended to make you think worse of ground mounted solar, the carpark side is to make the message palatable, but isn’t comparable. But solar farms in fields is the cheapest way of deploying massive solar plants
Carpark solar is limited to the power infrastructure at the carpark, the limit for commerical building solar in my town is 30kW, the solar farm nearest me (on a sheep field) is 13MW
Commercial buildings get to choose: solar on the roof or solar over the cars. Putting it over the cars will more than double the cost.
So this is, or acts as, propoganda, saying “this effective thing is bad, instead we should do this impossible thing”
Oh, to be clear, I don’t think carport solar arrays are fossil fuel propaganda. They’re a useful application where they fit. It’s the idea that solar on fields is harmful that I object to, and I worry that carport solar is being presented without the full context as a red herring, so folks like us who want more solar start objecting to utility-scale ground mount.
Oh I’m certainly in the ‘do both’ crowd, but particularly in summer I just wish the parking lots I had to go to were shaded more… Also in the rain…
Saying it’s unreasonable is too far, fair to disagree with it though… Fossil fuel is always happy to push clean energy projects that wouldn’t work well at scale to sabotage things. Though personally I’d say calling this out as car propoganda is more important…
Also in the US we grow massive amounts of corn to be processed into ethanol for gasoline, less than 5% of that land converted to solar would make the same amount of energy that all the ethanol from the corn produces. And if slightly less than half the land used for corn for ethanol was used for solar, the US would be at net zero carbon production.
And it’s not like ethanol is some byproduct that still allows that corn to be used for food or something else. Nope, we’re wasting all that land exclusively to burn up in our cars.
It’s crazy because ethenol COULD be just a byproduct from food production. Talking to farmers about a decade ago that what they were aiming for. Basically a step before just tilling it or burning it back into the field if it was misshappen (consumers don’t buy ugly veggies) or worse infested/rotting.
The subsidy structure messed that up apparently. The subsidized crop insurance made it not worth it, plus the ethanol subsidies required dedicated fields.
I 100% would rather see solar over dedicated ethanol fields and all of the water usage and pollution they represent.
Why would it be way more expensive? Sure, you’ll have to put it on poles, but…
The infrastructure to build a load-bearing roof over a parking lot is significantly more than the concrete footings and supports needed to hold ground-based solar. There are some public lots near me that have solar roofs over them. When I park there I almost feel like I’m pulling into an underground parking garage.
Not to mention… Much lower chance of some idiot ramming their car into the structure if it is out on a field somewhere.
But solar panels wouldn’t add a significant load. Pretty much any standard metal carport roof could support them.
Solar had pretty high wind loads that need to be supported
I’m not an expert by any means, but every commercial solar install I’ve seen over public parking lots has included steel beam construction mounted on reinforced concrete footings that extend 2+ feet above ground. The concrete footings appear to be designed not only to support the structure but to be able to absorb the impact of cars that might otherwise dent/bend the steel supports. A few examples:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fcQ9PUoWp68c21n57
https://maps.app.goo.gl/QqbmVsphByzN5Xi56
https://maps.app.goo.gl/n3wUKkYZLMCpzVTz5
The electrical infrastructure to support these is also significantly more than a residential solar setup. I have 44 panels on my roof, and I counted around 488 on one of these carports. I can generate around 85 kWh on a clear day, so one of these can probably generated 1000 kWh or more. You’ll need good electrical infrastructure to safely manage that and feed it into the grid. I didn’t need any infrastructure changes when my solar panels were installed other than a new utility meter. These all likely required a lot more than that.
Right, but there shouldn’t be any additional structural requirements to build a carport with solar panels vs one without. The steel beam construction is more than sufficient. Any electrical infrastructure, apart from wires to the panels, doesn’t need to be on the roof.
The count of panels on a wood frame house vs steel structure really isn’t something you can compare.
The actual panels are no longer the most expensive part of an install.
And if you put it on marginal farm land
I like to casually browse land (you know, to build a little community for me and my friends when I win the lottery) and I see this everywhere. A lot of farms by me have solar panels along the road, often quite a lot of them. I’d imagine a lot of crops don’t do well next to a highway.
Many of the listings point out that the existing contract with the utility company pays more than the property taxes
Honestly, nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar. Solar is great, but it’s not perfect. It requires a lot of lithium for batteries, and producing the panels puts carbon in the atmosphere.
Thorium makes sense for supplying metropolises and 24/7 heavy industry between sunset and midnight. Uranium doesn’t make sense because it’s rare and hard to mine. Daytime nuclear doesn’t make sense because solar is cleaner, cheaper, and decentralized. And it doesn’t make sense for smaller cities, towns, and rural areas because you need to waste a shit-ton of electricity transporting the power of one reactor long distances.
It’s easy to forget how wasteful it is to lose 90% of your electricity transporting it long distances when that is what all the 20th century infrastructure was built around. But there are tons of energy storage methods that don’t require lithium that are more efficient, provided the electricity is generated locally.
Nuclear is good for baseload, and although it is very clean, it isn’t quite carbon-free either. It’s also very expensive, unpopular, and has a lot of regulations. I agree it’s good and necessary, but solar and batteries are way cheaper and can go almost anywhere, so they’re way easier to deploy. With the pace of climate action we need, I don’t think it’s an either-or, we gotta do both, fast.
nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar.
Define “better.” Personally, I think nuclear is too expensive to be a current solution. Let all the existing nuclear plants continue out their useful lives, and extend them as feasible, but constructing new nuclear plants is probably not worth the cost, even compared to solar + enough grid scale storage to cover multiple nights of demand even when days are cloudy.
Terrapower just got approval to build their $4 billion, 345-MW reactor. That’s $11.6 million per MW.
NuScale canceled their 462 MW project in Utah when it became clear that the total cost was going to exceed $9 billion. That’s $19.5 million per MW.
Solar plants are about $1 million per MW. Grid scale 4-hour batteries are about $750,000 per MW.
And the costs of solar/batteries keep dropping, while nuclear tends to increase in cost over time.
And the solar doesn’t need nuclear industry staff, and doesn’t need nuclear industry certified parts, and doesn’t produce radioactive waste
Solar doesn’t need to refuelled
Solar needs active maintenance, including personnel of varying skills. All projects have ongoing costs, especially if they’re gonna sit outside in the weather.
Better to just compare all costs, across the projected lifespan, and compare replacement costs if one source lasts longer than the other.
Doing all that tends to show that building new nuclear isn’t cost competitive. Not big reactors, not small reactors.
But we also really need utility scale solar.
If you put them on most viable mad-made surfaces… do we really?
You can place ground based solar farms just outside cities where they have access to main power lines that can carry megawatts; inside the city they probably can only push kilowatts per phase.
30kW is the limit for commercial (or any 3 phase) solar generators in my town, that is cheaper to mount on the building roof
The solar farm nearest me, right near the high voltage wires that supply that side of the city, has 13MW of panels, three orders of magnitude more
You can (and probably should) cover your fields.
Exactly. People are so angry that they are looking for justification even where there isn’t any. It’s so tiring.
this is the synergy the middle managers were looking for
False dilemma.
Also that ain’t no field.
Crop yields are only very slightly affected by agrivoltaics and variance tends to be reduced. Water usage is reduced a lot.
Even dedicated agrivoltaics would only cover a fraction of usually sub standard land for giant power outputs. The fear of someone plastering the environment with solar is fear mongering.
Building enough parking infrastructure to cover with panels is a waste of space (outside of America).
helps livestock too so i hear
It’s probably a good idea to put solar panels on car parks where we’re going to have car parks anyway, though. In addition to agrivoltaics and using, as you say, substandard land for large scale solar. Also put it on roofs. Basically anywhere it doesn’t do any harm, I say.
Imagine a roof on the highways with solar panels.
Governments should encourage every home to have at least enough solar powered energy to run a small refrigerator, a space heater, a small cooking surface, and a radio as a matter of national security. That can be achieved with porch solar and significantly hardens a population against attacks on energy infrastructure.
Would also require an isolation switch to be effective. With a grid-tied solar install it’s going to dump all of the energy into the grid, and during a power outage that energy will simply not be collected.
I could see that becoming a thing where during a power outage you flip a switch near the electrical panel and then every green-colored outlet will run entirely off the solar panels when the sunlight is available. Or if we really want to make it technical solution, create special outlets that are dual power (grid and direct from solar) and then appliances plugged into these special outlets will switch between power sources as they’re available. Potentially some issues with two different AC circuits touching depending on how it’s implemented on the appliance side, but it could be a good solution especially if the controller can still backfeed excess energy production back into the grid
You don’t need that switch. There are already automatic switches. And if you have batteries you can load them from the panels and, in case they go too low, from the grid and then use the batteries to power your house.
We already have hybrid inverters that does that automatically, you don’t even need a different circuit or special outlets. It can manage all the grid ties, off grid and battery parameters on the fly
Well shit that’s awesome! Like I’m kinda curious how it handles the load exceeding capacity, but I suppose if you just turn everything off that should probably be fine
how it handles the load exceeding capacity
As in what happens if you plug too much stuff that it exceeds your solar production?
I’ll use mine as an example, but it might be different with different models and configurations:
Inverter can handle up to 10kw
If solar production is at 5kw, and home is demanding 7kw, in my case, I have it set up as to draw the remaining 2kw from the battery, if battery is depleted, it will draw 2kw from the utility companyIf home demands more than 10kw that the inverter can handle, it will trip the internal inverter protection or a circuit breaker leading to it
I want to do something like that but just have the solar circuits entirely disconnected from the grid, running stuff like fridge, freezer, water heater, car charger, etc (depends how many watts my panels can actually manage in practice; I don’t have a ton of space). all without being able to draw from the grid at all.
My state is pretty shitty about solar, and I don’t particularity want to give the electric company my surplus power for free for them to turn around and profit from, so fuck ‘em, ill figure out how to perfectly balance my use with my capacity and just save the spend.
With the current prices of panels you might install a few more than needed.
That’s so fucked up. Even people who install solar have to give free energy to the utility company, who probably still charge them for energy…
Yes, thats exactly what they do. No net metering, no discounts or rebates, nothing, but if your power flows back into the grid, they sure will charge for it at the exact same rate as if they created it themselves, and charge you as much as they can get away with to eat into your savings (some utilities around here even make you pay a monthly fee to have your own solar on “their” grid…). No surprise hardly anyone here has solar; it’s generally not worth having unless you can guarantee you use all of the power yourself.
My locality is mostly hydro power, we don’t even really have peak/off-peak rates, just pay the same all the time regardless because they can’t easily adapt to demand anyway. And like yay renewables and stuff, I’m super on board with that aspect, but I’m not on board with having a monopoly on the renewables, since my area is not typical of the state.
That’s absurd. People should use repurposed EV batteries and just power their homes on solar without connecting to the grid. I get that it’s probably a legal requirement to connect your solar to the grid, but that’s bullshit and nothing short of state-sanctioned theft.
Except most solar systems go down without power from the grid
Well, we could also stop adding a certain percentage of biofuel to our cars. The land that we gain from that, if covered by solar panels, would produce enough energy to cover all our energy demand.
Also a great idea. One of the things I think is good about putting it everywhere, though, is that it cuts transmission requirements+losses and increases resilience by having the generation be localised.
Eh, we’ve done pretty well with transmitting power. So although I do agree that spreading the load is always better, it should not be compromising the costs. As putting it “everywhere” also comes with some downsides.
I would say let’s maybe not have car parks at all? They suck. We should as a species try to phase out personal cars, first of all. And secondly, until then, underground garages are infinitely better for everyone else.
OK, so in 100 years you get your wish and personal cars no longer exist. For the next 100 years, would you like to:
- put solar panels on top of car parks; or
- not do that?
In addition, after 100 years on top of the car parks that still exist (perhaps for the shared cars), would you like to:
- have solar panels on top of them; or
- not have them?
The only problem is adding solar to car parks will ensure that those car parks remain there. Surprised to see so much support for this in the solarpunk community of all places.
How about we get that wish in, say, 10 or 20 years instead of your strawman scenario? Transforming cities to be walkable/bikable does not take that long, if you’re serious about it.
You forget that people live also outside of cities. If you live in a town away from any city you need a car.
No I didn’t. First of all, forgetting and disregarding aren’t the same thing.
Second, living in a small town isn’t an excuse. Small towns are inherently walkable (due to being, ya know, small) unless you somehow manage to design them spectacularly wrong. And contrary to American belief, it is actually possible to provide rail transit to them: the US itself used to do it 100 years ago, and Japan still does.
Personal cars are going to be here for way longer than 20 years, but 20 years is still long enough to build a lot of solar panels, so the same questions still arise. What will your answer be?
Tops of buildings, over canals, may be even over roads and rail.
It isn’t that far out of reach that a car park gets covered in solar panels, then the next developer reuses them when redeveloping the site for denser development.
That’s a false dichotomy. I can choose a third option. Where we place car parking garages (multi-level above or underground) all around ring roads and ban cars from entering city centers. Then we put solar panels on top of most roofs, and in fields for grazing animals.
This obsession with car parks is exclusively American.
So you want to demolish all the car parks that already exist? All of them, tomorrow? Don’t you think it will take some time before the builders can come and replace the last car park in your country with whatever it’s going to be replaced with? During that time, would it not be better to put solar panels on it? (And then remove them before it gets demolished and put them somewhere else)
I am not American, I just think it’s a stupid criticism of such a plan that we “shouldn’t have cars and therefore shouldn’t have car parks” because the fact is that we already do have them so we may as well use them as best we can.
In any case I don’t agree on a total ban on cars entering city centres, at least not in the foreseeable future. The most bike-friendly cities I have lived in and visited have also had many cars. I suspect there is a place for personal cars, deprioritised compared to buses and bikes, in most cities for many years to come. During that time there will need to be car parks. Those car parks should have solar panels on, along with pretty much all other buildings.
Many cities have already banned cars in their centers. It’s not a “what if”. It’s been done and works. And it takes as long to build those garages as it’d take to build those solar parks. And not like they couldn’t be done at the same time. Like instead of building solar over the car parks, why not spend the time and resources building them over warehouses and apartments?
I don’t know of any big cities that have banned cars from anything but small areas in their centres. I know that in my city, the centre of which is pedestrianised, nevertheless has many car parks, including two large park-and-ride facilities with large car parks that could have solar panels installed.
The reason to build them over car parks is because the ones being considered are surface-level, so any building work is cheaper and easier. And it also provides a benefit to users in the form of shade.
Ultimately we should indeed aim to cover rooves with solar panels, but let’s focus on the lowest-hanging fruit.
The USA has a stupid relationship with car parks, yes, but I’m not American and I’m not encouraging car parks at all, I just think we should put the space where they already exist and are actually useful to better use.
Ideally, yes, we’d have much better public transit infrastructure but it’d need to be every ten minutes on every route and not stop overnight or for Sundays or public holidays for it to be a viable replacement for a car for me. Which is very feasible in a big city but not so much out in the countryside.
Ultimately, some people will either always need personal cars (or perhaps some other solution, but no public transit I’ve ever seen will do it) for a huge variety of reasons, including disabilities and house locations (and I don’t mean suburbia, that’s generally solvable with public transit and also generally a bad idea).
Except in places where you can’t go below ground because of water, of course.
Well there are above ground parking garages as well…
Good idea on a paper, but its expensive to build steel frames for the panels and there is the risk of somebody crashing and making expensive mess.
Also maintaning and cleaning anything elevated is a bitch.
And parking need resurfacing or at least repainting of the lines everynow and then.
Another way to think is that if covering parking lots with shade would be easy and viable we would have much more of shaded lots without solar panels allready.
Brazil had tons of shades for their car parks, I thought it was really interesting.
My area has a lot of solar in parking lots I think maybe because permitting is easier, plus then you don’t have to put holes in your roof that causes even more leaks possibly.
The school my wife works at had a truck crash I to their solar and brought down like two big panels so definitely a safety concern
Covered parking is normal in different parts of the world actually.
And its more necessary in some places of the world.
Like triple-glazed windows are norm in different places of the world. Most places could benefit from those from purely energy conservation point, but in some places the benefits dont justify the cost and the effort.
Yeah, I’m largely spitballing. Perhaps the numbers don’t work out, perhaps they do.
That said, solar over parking is a source of income. It may well pay for itself whilst providing parking that is both shaded and rain sheltering and improving energy security and helping fight climate change and probably powering a bunch of charge points underneath it, which you could either charge for or just leave free to encourage people to come to whatever the parking is attached to (or just the parking itself if it’s a paid car park). My local Sainsbury’s has a free charging point and it’s a big part of why I shop there.
Also design the canopies to be their own scaffolding so the elevated maintenance is moot.
You can resurface under a canopy. Hell, petrol stations are almost always under a canopy and they definitely get resurfaced sometimes.
There’s a risk of someone crashing into any building, too, but we still build things that are useful beside roads.
I’m just saying that, yes, it’s not cut and dry, but I’m pretty sure the problems with the idea are generally solvable.
Solvable but not financially sound. Im not arguing that its a bad idea and that we should not do it. Im arguing that from the financial view its not profitable, so there is a reason why its not happening.
Oh wow. This is going to be a long one. Sorry for this and thanks if you take a time to read it…
You can resurface under a canopy.
Of course you can. But lets imagine you are a contractor. How much more you would charge doing a clean parking lot versus parking lot with lots of beams and high voltage equipment both over the head and under the pavement. Especially if cant bring larger equipment to there?
How about when you think about your business that uses that parking lot for the customers, how much it would cost to keep the lot closed for a two days it takes to resurface it instead of one.
But lets solve it by making the canopy larger, so they can use the bigger machinery and do what ever resurfacing they need with close to same price and nearly as fast than just a plain old flat parking space.
Now the initial building cost starts to multiply because larger structure needs more materials and things like wind start to effect more. Oh, higher canopy means the shadow is not on the parking spot anymore. Well we can live with that, or we can make the canopy wider and add more panels. It just means we need more and sturdier, more expensive material to do that. Well do it or not, the higher canopy makes maintaning the panels harder and more expensive, but wait we made the canopy to be its own scaffolding, that surely does not add to the building cost, engineering and designing is free and afterall. You probably need to close few parking spaces everytime maintanence is happening anyway.
Well lets say anything before this is non issue and there is enough panel coverage to justify the cost and maintanance. Rainwater has been easy to direct to right place and the structure can handle the weather, wind and possible snowfall, the electric cables and battery system were easy to place maintain and they are not fire risks and the project produces enough energy to justify the expense.
What happens with insurance. We have build rather expensive and delicate system in place where people of all ages drives around. What happens when somebody bumbs in to the supports keeping that whole thing upright. What if somebody crashes and part of it comes down. What if the maintanance guy takes a fall. Well in every case you, the owner of the lot need to either stop what you are doing and start to jump trough hoops, or you need to hire somebody to do so. Even if you are no way in fault, you need to make sure everything is structurally sound and spend time with the situation.
Well crashes happen. Lets not dwell on it. Lets focus on the good part. Free electricity. Is there enough of it to justify the building cost and the maintanance of this new system? Lets say there is and everything is fine and dandy. Who uses the electricity? Do i own the whole place and run my own business there. Great! I can use the electricity and even sell the excess. Or maybe there isint that much, but i can put few Evehicle charging ports there. Do they and the shade they produce bring enough business for me to justify the cost of building this canopy? Who knows. But wait. Arent most of the busineses renting their premises. Do i sell the electricity to them or just sell it on the open market. What kind of paper war i need to do so the lease is fair to everybody even if there are times when the panels dont produce because of the weather. Sounds like it could be headache. Well lets not worry about that either. Im sure the paperwork will solve it self. Alltough there are also plenty of places where the parking lots are owned by completelly different entity than the busines near them.
Now lets say all of the above is solved and ask the big question. The reason why i think we dont have these things build.
How you as a business man, justify all this, when you could spend the same amount of money renting or buying a lot of land somewhere else and have the same amount of solarpanels build with smaller maintanance costs in less accident prone enviroment and keep your parking lot as it is? Realistically it would be better to use that money on something else.
Only way i see this could happen is busines owners want be green or if they get tax benefits or something from it.
I think solarpanels on the parking lots could be nice, but i dont see a lot of incentive for doing it on big scale. I think most busineses would do better if they build just normal light weigh, easily movable canopies and just out the panels on the roof or the walls.
Thanks for reading my bullshit and sorry for any typoes in it.
What is the electricity bill of a supermarket? How long would pay itself a solar root on the parking lot?
All fair. And, to be clear, I’m suggesting it be mandated or incentivised by governments, I’m not suggesting businesses would do it on its own merits. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being a good idea for them in, say, twenty years time, even with all of the complications.
Solar panels are less efficient the hotter they get. Heat makes the electrons in the panel bounce around more at rest, which means they can’t be excited as much from the sun’s energy. Throwing them in a concrete desert with hot cars parked underneath would probably affect their performance significantly.
Yes, I’m well aware of this. There are plenty of locations where that’s not really a problem, though. And generally when they’re hotter and therefore less efficient it means there’s also relatively abundant sunlight, somewhat counteracting the effect of the heat. Cars also aren’t necessarily that hot, particularly if they aren’t powered by burning stuff. And putting all of that under the shade of a canopy would reduce the heat reaching the ground. If you used a brighter paving material like concrete, you could even benefit from bifacial panels using the reflected energy.
There are problems and there are solutions, maybe the problems outweigh the solutions but it’s still a worthwhile avenue of research to find that out.
All I’m saying is it would make more sense to put them over agricultural land than in parking lots.
Or just cover the corn fields.
