Ever since I was a kid, I used to wonder why roofs of buildings didn’t include, or where made of, solar panels.
No, parking lots need to be developed. We can’t have functional cities when every other plot of land is dedicated to park cars.
interesting concept. i think it would be cool if we had solar power cars so we wouldn’t put so much pollution in the environment. but i don’t think the tech is there yet and if it was big oil won’t let it happen.
I mean, functionally we do have the tech, but it’s just solar farms powering the grid/on rooftop, powering an electric car. Probably more efficient than putting the panel on the car anyways.
Not sure if this was mentioned cause there are quite a few comments on here. California is planning on putting them over the water canals to prevent evaporation and ‘save billions of gallons of water per year’.
India has been doing it since 2012, and these fuckers are claiming they invented the concept.
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.
Or maybe downsize them like crazy and use them for native plants or housing and build infrastructure like trains trams and busses to reduce the dependence on cars
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.
not near electrical infra
Unlike the average field
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.
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.
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?”
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.
Animal agriculture, excepting very small symbiotic regenerative practices youve never fucking heard of, ends in any future where we still have humans in a century.
This is not a moral imperative. The future where thats viable is underwater and boiled to a grey lump.
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.
It’s the top photo AI? You aren’t supposed to put panels on flammable material like that.
Which here is the flammable material?
Dried grass.
The grass won’t go dry under these panels if mowed regularly
Mowed regularly beneath the shallow panels themselves?
You won’t believe what I’m about to show you
spoiler
I actually cannot believe it, they are so small! How the hell do they store cut grass?
I’d assume they’re mulching mowers.
Since the labor cost to run them is minimal, they can be run daily and produce tiny clippings that remain on the turf as mulch.
Carport solar is a terrible idea.
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Increased height for structure, likely increased weight as well since you need to make super-duper sure they don’t pancake somebody’s car. This leads to;
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MUCH greater chance of property damage and resulting payouts (not to mention the risk of somebody’s Timmy managing to shock themselves)
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Harder to build and maintain due to number 1, as well as having a bunch of cars around, needing to schedule lot closures, etc.
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Number 3 gets in the way of actually using the parking lot as a parking lot, which is probably going to be pretty unpopular with the property owner and/or lose them money from decreased business.
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Oh yah, harder to angle due to the constraints you’re under, so less efficient.
All this adds up to making it a lot more expensive than just putting them on the ground. We have TONS of abandoned malls and supermarkets all over the country, just use that smh.
i remember when i was five on the top floor of a parking garage i touched the solar roof on my great-great granpappy’s fisker karma and got a nasty shock. Shocked the gay right out of me. But then i touched some exposed wiring on one of the tall lampposts and that turned me Bi so who’s laughin now gramps
coincidentally, the lamppost then also fell into his car, and he renounced his commitment to the environment and bought a Hummer h2 with his fat insurance payout
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It’s either a roof structure by itself or adds another ~3cm of height to an existing roof.
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You vastly overestimate the weight of solar panels. The ones shown probably weigh ~20kg, and probably ~35kg with framing etc. Most car roofs are rated to 30-150kg of dynamic weight. In the statistically highly improbable event where the structure completely collapsed it certainly will not “pancake” anything and will likely just be cosmetic damage.
“somebody’s Timmy managing to shock themselves”
No more dangerous than any of the wires that are, probably, within a few meters of you as you read this.
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“Harder to build and maintain” sure, but not by much and nothing requiring the full lot closures you’re imagining.
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“harder to angle” Sort of, there might be instances where a suboptimal angle results in better aesthetics, cheaper materials, snow clearing, etc. but we’re talking ~10-15% efficiency loss.
Based on the shoddy logic and non-existent research I’m guessing this isn’t really about the solar panels. You wanna share what the deeper concern/peeve is?
My concern is people advocating for expensive and ineffectual strategies because it looks cool in a social media post instead of doing things that are actually useful. We have an insane amount of land to use. Do public transit, do utility-scale solar. Don’t do this nonsense.
Oof, I 100% feel you there. That is a huge problem and those 2 suggestions are critical things that need to be done more of. I’m 100% with you that pretending like these dinky little instillations are at the scale of what is needed is ridiculous.
However. I do think your overall frustration is coloring your perception of this solution a bit. I think you would be shocked at the efficiency possible from a distributed solar network like this.
Yes, a centralized utility scale solar in the “insane amount of usable land” is more efficient both resource-wise due to economies of scale and in generation due to things like sun-tracking. However, it has significantly more transmission losses and labor upkeep.
A distributed solar network’s goal is to reduce those transmission losses by having the generation at point of load and increase local independence/resiliency at the cost of some resource and generation efficiency. It is solving a slightly different problem and so has different weighting on the cost/benefit analysis.
Understanding more where you’re coming from; I get it. But projecting that frustration onto decent solutions to different problems in such a factually incorrect way is not helping.
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What insanity is this, have you ever been in a parking garage where most are like 8ft ceilings. Most solar car parks are well over 12ft and no issue with building them. Yeah it’s more expensive to build solar car ports vs ground based but you don’t need to build big transmission lines which delay or prevent many large solar fields. Then hopefully you can have EV charging stations right there power cars off the sun.
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Can we stop this shit
Dont cover our car parks. Cover our public transit stations…oh wait. There are none. (USA)
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
Theres a cure for them, though.
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I would like them on our sidewalks. Obviously, trees would be better but if we aren’t gonna plant trees, then at least provide us shade with solar panels, please.
