Solar canopies on parking lots
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Not a problem. Solar canopies can be built 20' off the ground. (A grocery store near me has one.)
Or provide a separate area for huge vehicles - even if people transporting 200-ton mining haul trucks want to stop off at Wal-Mart en route, it's not like they'll expect to pull into standard bays.
The 18-wheeler format (even with 2x trailers or even 3x trailers) has built in efficiencies. We probably should think about how to support those kinds of efficiencies in grocery stores / Walmart centers.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Walmart uses larger trucks like that on a consistent basis as a cornerstone of its logistic strategy.
And this is at a grocery store with only 2 loading dock bays directly off a fairly busy street, and a total of about 8 customer parking spaces. This is the absolute best case for unloading everything at a warehouse and shipping point to point with a few box trucks instead of making it a stop on everyone's literal or figurative milk run, yet they don't do it.
I'm pretty sure reducing truck-miles barely registers when it comes to "efficiencies" in logistics.
Not an issue for the vast majority of parking lots, but it is something to consider.
My house is almost 100% covered by solar panels, they pretty much are my roof. It's really nice. I wonder how much energy we could generate if every house had solar panels instead of roofs. There probably aren't enough batteries in the world to store all that power.
Solar power with batteries for everything, nuclear energy as backup.
One church I know did this to most of its parking lot, and has tons of spare energy to sell back to the grid.
1) the projects are very expensive, for their project it cost $13mil, is expected to last 25 years, and saves them a total of $15mil. So a $2mil saving IFF no more than a few panels prematurely fail.
2) it still doesn’t get them off the grid.
Until panels become cheaper, or last longer and become more efficient, this isn’t viable to do everywhere.
So covering parking lots has a couple of externalizing factors as well. First, it really does mitigate CO2 pollution by replacing fossil fuel power with PV generated power. It also makes customers more willing to spend more time in your store if their car isn't being baked. And finally if it saved you $2M over 25 years, that is $80,000 a year which allows you to hire additional service staff that aren't being paid out of sales margins, and the increased level of service has been shown to both support more sales and higher margins[1].
What I'm trying so illustrate here is that there are additional factors over a straight "saves a bit more than it costs".
[1] There is a wonderful report on how Nordstroms became the most valuable per sq ft store because they focused on service, service, service. I believe it came from the Harvard Business school but it I didn't find it with a quick search of my archived papers.
You also assume that their savings won’t be needed for something else. Who’s paying for the next installation after this one needs replacing after 25 years? The $2m they save over 25 years isn’t enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
[2] https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-solar-canals...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24046951 (70 comments 148 points)
I like your idea though. Let people who can’t get solar for whatever reason invest in solar elsewhere and get some money back or a credit against their own usage.
https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/295876008
Solar development required private investment to supplement public spending, the researchers found. For the projects to be valuable investments, developers managed their financial risks by increasing the size of the projects and spreading the risks across multiple projects. Large solar developers seek to build or acquire new projects to spread their risks and generate more profits, which in turn makes it easier to get low-cost loans.
...
The result is an energy system characterized by a few very large generating stations linked to consumers over long transmission lines, rather than a more distributed system serving communities closer in proximity. That makes consumers vulnerable to an extreme weather event 1,000 miles away, Kennedy said.https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/community-solar.html
According to the law, the HOA may make reasonable restrictions but they may not increase your cost by more than $1000 or decrease your solar efficiency by more than 20%.
So tell your HOA to shove it.
This varies HOA to HOA. Mine has one-page bylaws mostly dealing with outdoor parking rules and not putting explosives in places.
Not sure why people complain about HOAs when they bought the house knowing full well what they were in for. I had to agree to the HOA rules well before I bought the house.
Ah, the old fallacy of choice, usually heard as “you can choose to work somewhere else”. If most homes are under a HOA and they all have similar policies, complaining is well justified.
Myself I don't like any of the HOA rulesets so I avoid them It's never been a hindrance to me. It's largely not a fallacy of choice here.
Ah, selective enforcement. We know why that's a bad idea when the cops do it, but when the HOA does it it's all good.
Not sure why people complain about HOAs when they bought the house knowing full well what they were in for.
HOA's are like Wikipedia admins, perhaps well-meaning, definitely with an agenda, and 100 % unaware of best practice. Back then, we had civil servants upholding city code. Nowadays we have HOA's where they won't hesitate to fine you for the wrong shade of paint and will do jack shit about the neighbour who breeds mosquitoes in his flowerpot dishes. (For those who don't know, standing water rich in organic materials is mosquito paradise.)
Maybe to some people, but when we were last buying a property, one of the places we put an offer on had a rule that you weren't allowed to hang clothes to dry on your balcony.
We did make an offer, but that rule made me a lot less interested in putting in a generous offer.
Only the law fines me (EU), not some randos making up their rules. As this part of hoa's is part of the horror stories, what happens if you do indeed tell them to shove it, and dont pay?
It's the same kind of "fine" that video rental stores used to have if you didn't return the movie on time.
In the UK I’m sure the local concils have their own rules and function similar to an HOA. There is a historic district in my city that is “controlled” by the historic society and city.
I live in an upper middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of a major US Midwestern city. The community is diverse and split evenly between families with young kids and retirees. We pay $500 / year in fees, which goes toward holiday decorations and minor block party events, and a management company that mainly enforces code such as keeping lawns weed and pest free.
My neighbors on both sides each had major weed control issues that were spreading to my lawn and garden, resulting in about twice the weeding effort on my part, but eventually the HOA kicked in and they both developed a sudden interest in lawn care and hired local companies to do the basics. We also started sharing with our neighbors extra bulbs that our garden produces anyway, now that our neighbors and their gardens became receptive.
We have had a couple notices from the HOA about code items ourselves, and it was stuff that we were going to fix anyway that the HOA noticed. They were cordial about it and thanked us for letting them know we were in front of it. There were no threats or fines, except what is implicit in the bylaws.
The main bylaws are cosmetic, things like keeping paint, mailboxes, and trim in shape. We have made several requests, just a one page letter, for accommodations to the HOA and they have approved each one.
The board of the HOA are just other neighbors down the street, and I am very grateful to them donating their time and effort unpaid to keep order in the neighborhood. Property sells very quickly and several of our friends have complimented us on our neighborhood when they visit.
This was our first HOA experience, and I was skittish about entering into it but cannot think of any complaint. I find it very effective.
There have been houses in the neighborhood that have been neglected to the point of becoming unlivable and it is great to have a framework to recover them and fill them with happy families that we can befriend, up to and including seizing the property if it ever came to that, but to my knowledge it never has and hopefully never will.
Right now, the other owners have lockboxes attached to an area on the gate and they give out the code to the short term rentals.
The board of the HOA refuses to switch the lock. Reasons have been all over the map, but one of the dumbest ones was that they were afraid the codes would get leaked out and that the other full time persons stalker would get into the building.
As an engineer, the simple logic baffles. I kindly pointed out that a code on the gate is no different than a code on the lockbox attached to the gate. Never mind that the building isn't secure at all... it is super easy to just climb the fence to get onto the property. Or her stalker could just wait till she opens the gate.
I've now had two deliveries stolen because they were left at the front gate for 10 minutes. They still refuse.
The 'horror' stories aren't really horror. It is just having to deal with people who you would never have to deal with under normal circumstances. I'd say this goes with owning any property in a city... you don't pick your neighbors.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Schlage-FE575-PLY-626-ELA/dp/B001COEZ...
> why can’t I subsidize this and own my own piece over the aqueduct, the same as if they were on my roof?
They cannot block ham antennas because they contribute to public safety. But they would much rather live with flowers.
FCC regulations prevented any governing body from prohibiting the installation of a HAM radio antenna.
After the passing of H.R. 1301 in 2016, the HOA may legally require you to get their prior approval before installing an outdoor antenna of any kind.
Suffice it to say, based on my understanding, it has never been the case that ham radio operators had any special relief from HOA rules.
Here the one 2km from my home:
https://www.enercoop.fr/blog/actualites/midi-pyrenees/pousse...
https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/service/presse/pressemi... (German)
Is that a problem there as well, or is that more of a local issue in some (other) areas of the country?
There's been about 2500 complaints about this last year in my region of this small country. And the company in charge of the grid refuse to give any compensations.
Could you create a separate grid in your home? Off-grid or maybe hybrid, having no connection to your domestic power connections nor the supply. You'll be able to reuse nearly all of the existing solar equipment and will just need to invest a bit more to re-architect some of the electrical system in your home.
It may be a little awkward to use, since you'll be sometimes unplugging appliances from one supply to another. But if you were willing to invest in energy storage too, there'd be more consistency from your solar and less need to unplug appliances.
North American products pictured, European versions probably available, but perhaps from a different vendor.
1: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/smart-home-panel 2: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-pro-portable-power-sta...
Better than the stories of exploding substations being a Belgian plague that I heard from electric grid engineer few years ago
That's not stupid at all, it's unavoidable if you want to still have enough energy when you don't have peak production. Given how cheap solar is getting, it may even be more economical. And you always have the option to add storage later, when it becomes more economical (which it isn't yet).
It sounds like it's grid-tie only - so it just shuts down when the local grid is over-voltage. Ideally you'd want something that could run in an isolated mode, if only to supply power to something useful like an electric water heater.
Isolated DC-coupled solar is mostly done by DIY folks with inverters like Sol-Ark that can do AC or DC-coupling and can work when the grid is shutdown. Your solar constantly charges your batteries and powers your house as a microgrid. Any excess power COULD be sold back to the grid, but to avoid the added hassle of interconnection agreements, most just store it into a larger battery bank for rainy days. The goal here is to fully zero out your monthly power bill AND be self-sustaining.
I’m shaking my head over here. 2 years.. They could have gotten together with the public to lobby for their ability to sell power to other places, or built some type of power-intensive value producer (desalination? hydrogen?).. They could be far richer than if they just sell power to residences.
However, this is ripe for disrupting like Uber did by skirting laws in many areas. Could it possibly be legal to 'provide' power and create a residential subdivision with a microgrid and the price is part of the sale of the house?
If that happens energy companies will at that point be lobbying to force endusers to stay on grid to continue subsidizing maintenance.
We aren't at that tipping point yet but with large tax breaks coming for EV ownership, an EV vehicle also makes a great way to dump "excess" solar power. Enough so that gas stations will start disappearing over the next few decades as well. Again, IMHO.
If batteries get cheap enough it might make sense for an entrepreneur to sell or lease solar+battery+charger to people who want to sublet part of their property, crowd sourcing EV charging.
I mention it here because it’s important to watch out for these types of laws and vote as neccessary
I think we're there now. You can get "server-rack" LiFePO4 batteries for about $1500 for a 5kWh battery. You can probably get solar, inverters, and 30kWh of batteries for about $25,000 and this should last maybe a few days for most homes. Mini-splits instead of central HVACs reduce power consumption a good bit, and have better energy efficiencies.
I mean unless your on nuclear or something that takes entire days to throttle up or down in which case congratulations you are now on a 100% green grid
The grid is expensive to maintain and it isn't there to deliver solar power the other way, there is no reason why it would compensate you. Next when Solar is generating the wholesale price is usually low, so really you shouldn't get paid much anyway.
The final problem with Solar in Northern countries is that in cold Winter nights you want to get power from the grid and use the infrastructure which most of the year now doesn't make any money. So either you should pay very high electricity prices in those periods ie several Euro/kwH (which isn't politically acceptable) or realistically solar should be restricted in the first place.
Lol if you're going to downvote me, tell me why residential solar deserves to get paid as much as it is.
Has some useful info.
Yes this is what is needed. The problem with Northern Europe is that the VOS would be so tiny people wouldn't bother.
Why would they be going to all the bother of buying it if it had no value?
Belgium has a lot of Nuclear so not such a big problem. Its still burning gas though so more solar would help. Again farms are easier rather than residential houses who expect to get paid 10c/kwH on a sunny day in May.
Since the article is in German, I will give a short summary here:
The solar panels of the person concerned are not completely off the grid, but the connection was already deactivated for more than 90 days this year. However, he is entitled to compensation for the electricity not taken, which so far amounts to 35,000 Euros.
The article predicts that the problem will worsen rather than diminish in the near future, as grid expansion cannot keep pace with new installations, affecting wind more than solar. However, there is disagreement about whether this is a general problem or only a regional one and how long it might last. According to the article, a total of 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity was lost in Germany in 2020 (the latest available figure) due to downward adjustments.
I don't think it makes sense to count all of that as "lost", at least in the sense of framing it as mismanagement.
If you want solar to supply a large part of a country's electricity, you have to overprovision to cover cloudy days, which automatically means that only a very sunny day, you'll produce more electricity than you can use, since large-scale storage is not yet feasible.
Something similar I could observe myself on a local scale in the region my parents live (also in the state of Bavaria, about 100 km away from the person who is mentioned in the Spiegel article). There, the limiting factor for the size of new solar parks was the capacity of the grid nodes in the vicinity. This is of course only anecdotal.
[1] They first wanted to build "cheap" overhead power lines. After protests from the population along the planned routes, they changed their minds and decided in favour of underground cables and had to start planing again. Unfortunately, it took more than two years for them to change their minds. (And of course, it was not them that were responsible for the delay, but the evil protesters, generally long procedures and nonsensical appeal options.)
The whole Suedlink process has been a triumph of pseudo-environmental Nimbyism over the actual environment and now threatens the whole energy stability of Germany in the coming energy-crunch winter.
Surprisingly, because I would expect them to act exactly how you said :)
Source: google search on "PJM Interconnection Backlog"
The lobbying angle explains A LOT. Of course, it's entrenched players clinging on to their profits. Oh well.
The cost argument is interesting.. one would think it would be cheaper to build on already-developed lots, since no earth-moving and other infrastructure work is required -- but it looks like the structures must conform to a higher standard. Nobody cares if a panel topples in some remote field, but it one falls on someone's car, bad press and lawsuits.
I certainly hope things move forward and we see more solar over the desolate landscape of the endless parking lots in North America. If anything, the promise "free" power to the lot owners could tip the scales.
Even so, the frames are sturdy enough to hold the panels against strong winds.
Basically, the owners of these things are usually syndicated and are in the business of harvesting money from taxes via accelerated depreciation. Having an asset that is producing money breaks the business model… they want to lose money on paper for the first few years.
Usually when I see these types of things they are local businesses, banks or other entities that actually own their own property, or leaseholders making their own improvements to save opex. A few Targets near me have solar roofs, for example.
Nope - trenching through a concrete or blacktop parking lot is much more work than running conduit on undeveloped land. Also, you’ve got to shut down your parking lot for a few weeks to do the work.
It makes sense to do when building a new parking lot, in fact I see that kinda frequently these days, but retrofitting one seems like a lot of work
If America had this kind of attitude during world war two it never would have supplied the world with the machines needed to win the war.
Not only is this easier than previous mobilization against existential threats but we have better technologies for communicating and computing than ever before.
If the logistical problem of coordinating underpaid illegal undocumented workers to shift between the walmart parking lot and home depot parking lot with surplus workers going and banging out a few McDonald's and Denny's restaurants is too much I gotta say we're fucked man.
They can do one or two rows at a time without blocking use of the rest of the lot, and without stopping and starting.
Labor is most commonly a tiny fraction of the cost of a solar installation, home rooftop excepted.
You are much better off doing an entire parking lot at once, or maybe half at a time, than you are doing multiple sections, as that work isn't all done be the same people.
Construction is mainly making post holes and placing and truing posts, and pouring concrete. Concrete can be poured at day's end. Electricals can go in last, after framing for the whole lot is up, also a row or two at a time. Wiring does not need to be trenched; it is out of the weather at the ceiling, and more accessible for service.
It is always easy to think of a dumb way to do anything. Admittedly, some people habitually stop there. Some contractors, even.
Overall, as PV panel prices continue to trend downwards, we'll see less big installation in sunny places (which originally were the only ones that made financial sense) to more, smaller installs as other costs come to dominate the equations.
Here's a point that worries me slightly. With climate change comes more turbulent weather, and increased winds everywhere. Surely the first casualties of a gale or hurricane are panels. The bigger the area, the more vulnerable the installation.
Nice concern troll.
That's a little rude and uncalled for isn't it?
Whether uncalled-for or not depends on your intent. Only you are in a position to know for sure. My own feeling was that the comment was mostly deserved.
Objections and problems raised against proposed solutions to critical issues, just left for someone else to solve feels disingenuous. Whether not it actually is.
Maybe, next time try to solve your own objections and we won't get the drama.
Is the cynicism concern trolling? I'm not sure. Certainly there are people "with agendas" that would toss cynical remarks into a discussion thread like they were thought-grenades.
But the more erudite leanings of HN also attracts a kind of skepticism from people who want to post as naysayers because it suggests they have already perceived the issue, saw its failings, and have moved on ... intellectually.
I hate to even post the above because I'm pointing too many fingers and don't wish to put anyone on the defensive. (There are other reasons I am sure someone would post a contrarian comment.) I wanted to explain though why I don't immediately jump to "concern troll" when I see a negative comment put forth on a story about a very progressive idea.
Actually, windmills.
Seriously, I asked my electrical inspector why there are so few domestic-y scale windmills in my part of New Mexico, where for several months a year we have raging wind every day. "Nobody builds one that can last more than a year or so out here".
The panels, on the other hand, are just fine.
1) fixed-tilt, seasonally-adjustable, flat-panel PV
2) single-axis-tracking, flat-panel PV
3) dual-axis-tracking, concentrator photovoltaics
What is adjusted for the season? The angle of the panels? I would imagine that one would have to be very close to the equator for this to be worthwhile.
Tilting for summer achieves maybe 70% of the power of an automated tracker. In the winter it’s much closer. I suspect in snowy places that the extra weight could overload the automated mechanism. In winter, tracking and fixed achieve nearly the same.
If you were retilting for summer at 25 degrees latitude, you’d tilt slightly away from the equator.
that is true, but on the flipside you can avoid a lot of the trenching by putting the conduits in the structure of the canopy. The other important thing to note is that large buildings tend to have large substations near by, so the actual amount of trenching required is a lot less.
However it does require a lump of capital to do, and it only makes sense really for the corporation that owns the land to do it.
Would you have to shut down the whole parking lot for roof work?
It's anecdotal, but most parking lots I've seen around LA seemed to have an open top floor which was mostly empty since people presumably prefer their cars to be shaded. I know I specifically didn't want to leave my motorbike on the top floor for this specific reason.
So adding solar panels, which would add shape, would basically increase the parking lot floor.
That would more commonly be called a parking garage or structure, a parking lot as referred to in the article is just an open, paved area of ground. I suspect the construction issues for the top floor of a parking structure are different from those of ground-level installation with no existing vertical structure. Also, by their very nature, parking garages most likely have significantly less square footage on the top floor than a parking lot for the same number of vehicles.
* edited out reference to surviving hurricane. Can't recall exact year this went up.
Even a canopy without electronics on it, or a lot without a canopy on it, must be maintained to some degree. And parking lots are often mandated, with a specified capacity, for every use.
Now that we're in an era where cities are moving toward eliminating cars from the road, reducing parking lot acreage, and easing those aforementioned mandates. So, as a business, we'll want to calculate the tradeoffs of installation and maintenance, as well as the understanding that we're less able or willing to demolish a productive solar array when I need to build something else in its stead.
Installing solar arrays over a parking lot may essentially lock-in that desolate acreage while the value of the land underneath them begins to ramp up.
Then there is servicing the solar. And engineering/architecture bespoke to each case. I can see how a large solar farm might make all that more efficient.
Put it this way, home solar is not always a no-brainer, financially, and that doesn't usually involve building a structure, just attaching them to a roof.
If your area allows you to opt into power from a solar farm, and pay the solar farm's rates, jump on it.
Say you have 1000 car parks, 1000 plans you need to send to local governments, 1000 architectural plans to deal with, and son on.
Some of the things will scale but a lot wont.
Also who said one person owns 1000 lots. I am saying there are 1000 separate lots we want to solarize, vs. a plant. If they are owned by different people, then you need a business to market, educate and sell this to them etc. Which is another layer.
Where I live, home solar pays for itself in 4-5 years; for our office building, it was 3-4 years.
But it is worth stressing, that solar is even more efficient if you put it on fields rather then farming for energy production.
Another interesting option is to mount solar panels higher up with some gaps and then do farming below them. For many crops, the yield is barely reduced due to the solar panels and with the global warming, the partial shade even might result in lower water consumption.
With solar (and of course wind in suitable regions) we have all the energy production potential available, not only to fight climate change but overall have more and cheaper energy in the long term. Not to mention no environmental pollution.
[1]: For the average German electric car the math works out that on average 10 solar panels would produce enough energy to operate the car - they would basically fit on a car port. The driving distances in the US are certainly longer, but then there is also more sun and the car ports might be larger, in consequence, the calculation wouldn't be far different.
Or put them on grazing fields[1] and get the extras of i) shade for the lambs, ii) free plant management around the panels, and iii) maybe reduced water consumption.
[1] https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/04/mixing-she...
The cheapest setup, in most fields, is to make fence-rows of bifacial panels, running north-south to pick up morning and afternoon sun, and particularly to block late afternoon sun that stresses plants most.
But some crops (and livestock) benefit from protection against hail and storm rain. Then, again put up fence rows, but with the panels sticking out from both sides. Running them east-west, it is easy to tilt them to pick up the southern light better. (Northern, for you kiwis.)
Of course less than needed in winter and more in summer.
Edit: fixed computations 2x2.5x1000 hours of sun of 20% efficient = 2.5 MWh then 2.5 MWh / 150 Wh/km = 16666 km.
The environmental impact of building solar farms in the middle of the desert didn’t seem very high compared to impact of global warming (or like they said growing grain for ethanol).
Regardless, the answer should be yes to anything that will move us along towards more clean energy.
Walmart could do it at scale, but they already can put megawatts of solar on existing roofs for their stores. Article mentions several states where solar is discouraged to protect monopolies. Not to mention another article out saying Republican-led states are actively punishing corporations who reduce their emissions. Walmart isn’t going to see a realistic payback from that investment, and could even face backlash. They also sometimes get tax credits and incentives from the power company to build a Supercenter in a certain area. They do however buy into solar farms to offset their carbon.
Other retailers (Trader Joe’s or Starbucks) it wouldn’t make sense for, most lease their buildings and don’t have enough expertise to take this on. Commercial property owners wouldn’t care about this.
Some states in the USA have a “community solar” project concept where you can invest in a solar project and the power it generates can directly credit your electric bill (basically decoupling location from solar ownership). I just wish it worked better and more people were investing in it.
If the parking lot and building belong to the developer, they can put up the solar farm. Besides pocketing the extra revenue, they can attract better tenants or offer better prices than the competition.
Farm fields, pastures, canals, lakes, and reservoirs are smart places for solar.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5849703,3.8875289,133a,35y,39...
But we get a lot of snow here and it is really nice to come out after it's snowed and not have to clear the snow off your car!
Every sufficiently large building has a loading dock. Those that get regular use with trucks that sit there for a while (trailers loaded and unloaded while the driver waits) could have rapid chargers for trucks.
Some battery capacity would be needed to account for grid limitations in some areas. This would be a great second life for degraded car batteries. If the batteries are near full while the short term expectation is for high generation, the price could drop.
L2 chargers is what we desperately need. L3 chargers should be reserved to be built at long range locations.
L2 chargers at a grocery store could give you ~40 miles in an hour. Enough to cover your daily commute.
Put a bunch of L1 chargers in an office garage. They'll do around 4 miles in an hour.
The reason to do it this way is because the same L3 connection doing a single 350kW charger can power ~30 L2 chargers. The circuit doing a single L2 chargers can power 10 L1 connections.
We can reasonably put a slow charger pretty much anywhere someone would park. These slow chargers hardly impact the grid and are cheap to add.
This is because all EVs have an AC to DC converter (L1 and 2 are AC, just different voltages).
L3 ends up being a lot more expensive due to the high powered AC to DC converter required and usually a dedicated power line.
Further, because of the amount of amps being pushed, L3 chargers need special cabling (usually liquid cooled).
Short answer: yes. L1 to L2 isn't that dramatic - it's typically a 240V 40A separate circuit, which is not something to dick around with lightly but pretty easy stuff for a regular electrician. L2 to L3 is a very different ballgame, involving specialist installers and interacting with the power company to get a fatter circuit. Even a single 100kW charger needs a circuit that would be at the high end of what most people get for their whole house, so for a bank of them you're equivalent to a whole subdivision.
I agree with GP that L2 is the way to go for most parking lots. It's enough to provide more charge than the round trip took for most visitors, and you can have a bunch of them. Also you don't have to deal with different charging standards; J1772 is practically universal. You could put in even more L1, but you'll quite likely to have more than you have customers (at one time) to use them and those customers won't get as much charge back as they consumed for the visit. For something like a corporate campus where people stay all day it makes more sense, and an apartment complex likewise except that you'd need some local storage to "time shift" from the sunny day to the occupied night.
Also, while I'm here, I'll raise another point that I haven't seen mentioned. The shade provided by a parking-lot solar array isn't just a matter of comfort or aesthetics. When it comes to charging EVs, it also allows faster charging and/or can help extend battery life. It's rare to find two technologies that complement each other so well.
All that said, this is still a good solution for the land use pattern we have today. When it comes to environmentalism I’m of the view that perfect can often be the enemy of good.
Also, the panels mitigate the parking lots from becoming heat storage batteries (so to speak).
There's a reason summer temps fall further at night in rurals areas (e.g., Vermont) than they do in urban / suburban areas (e.g., New Jersey). Trees and such don't hold heat the way pavement does.
Now obviously simply adding solar panels to parking lots in NJ isn't going to have a massive impact, but it's not going to hurt either.
It’s also almost certainly illegal in many municipalities, most of which basically say “no” to everything by default and only allow development that follows strict land use and aesthetic rules; yes even for parking lots.
With a mandate to build a parking lot of a certain size, a business is going to say no trees; they would reduce auto capacity, present a maintenance burden, attract wildlife, and continually drop organic stuff on your customers' cars. And so that's exactly why cities find the need to mandate them!
I actually think at some point people will _prefer_ to patronize locations that have solar shading over ones that don’t. And just think: if they generate enough power they might be able to compete on prices by supplementing profits with solar generation.
Something seems economically broken in the solar business. It should be an arbitrage that so many people pile into that panel prices plummet as fast as compute processing and RAM has. Economically, Moore's law should also apply to solar panels, but the R&D isn't economical either.
Sure, the hard problem isn't collection but transmission and storage, but again, what is the R&D bottleneck? We could say the subsidies on fossil fuels means the competitiveness of solar is suppressed, but maybe we need some breakaway regions that make it viable, like a hundred solar Las Vegas'es that run on cryptocurrency chips signed by solar power producers, and govts can tolerate our autonomy in exchange for taking the risk on tech to create newly sustainable economies.
If you really want solar power, legalize gambling with a provably solar powered cryptocurrency. I could build the first low powered rig in an afternoon, as it would be a panel hookup, a raspi, and the secret sauce would be the HSM that signed the tokens it produced. If someone stole the keys, you just fork and grandfather tokens produced before the compromise. If someone swapped their panel for grid power instead of solar to produce them, the sun is the ultimate open random number generator and by encoding bursts from it into the token, you could see whether a miner was producing consistently based on volume relative to the random stream from the sun.
I don't think it's the tech that is the problem, there's something fishy about the economics, as these are solvable problems.
Two, the tech is just forming to help solve some things, such as "floatovoltaics". Covering Lake Mead will help, or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. But water is very corrosive. Engineers have also stayed away from putting power lines in water for good reason. The tech for floatovoltaics is just now emerging, and even the national electric code has just put something in it for 2023.
Three, raw materials shortages. Solar requires a lot of silicon, aluminum, glass, and steel. Batteries require a lot of rare earth metals from harmful mining practices. You need billions of tons of copper just to handle the wiring and distribution side of things. Almost all lithium battery and solar manufacturing is overseas in China. There are some in the U.S., but not enough to make a serious dent in solving the overall problem. EV batteries have secured over 140% of the available lithium mines in the world. Alternative batteries like sodium-ion are exclusively produced at scale in China, but startups like Natron Energy are trying to change that (again, not enough to make a dent). But the main point is that there isn't enough lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, silicon in the world to go around without having some serious inflation and supply chain issues along the way. The tech doesn't yet exist for grid-scale energy storage that doesn't rely on lithium and its closest cousin sodium-ion doesn't have the manufacturing scale to produce the billions of cells annually needed to tackle this problem.
Four, the U.S. lacks political will. Republican states are actively damaging companies who are reducing their carbon emissions. Fox News labels climate change as "woke politics". Thus, you have 40-50% of Americans believing solar panels and EVs as "bad" things. It then trickles down to local politics like where the article shows that Southern states should be accounting for 33% of solar production, but due to poor politics/laws they only account for 7%.
Imo, this is the economic case for proof-of-work in cryptocurrencies as instead of shedding load into the ground or burning off gas, it gets refined into tokens that both store and transmit value. It's the missing feedback cycle in the economy. I'm suggesting a verifiably solar currency used for gambling will drive innovation in areas like graphene solar panels and other new techs. We can convert an energy storage and transmission problem into a financial securitization and risk problem that feeds back into driving optimization of the energy production problem. The sun is a verifiable random number generator that with a clock signal, the whole network can use it for consensus.
We may be talking past one another, but if macro grid economics and the politics around them are standing in the way of sustainable tech, we may need to route around them.
"Ooh, a turn is coming up! Who will turn the steering wheel so we don't run off the road?" ... "Oh, we have a driver? Why didn't anybody tell me?
My second response: if society considers the electric automobile as an acceptable substitute for efficient land use and transportation infrastructure, perhaps we should be mandating this form of in situ power generation for automobiles so that people who make more environmentally sustainable decisions and those who cannot afford an automobile do not end up subsidizing power for those who choose to drive.
EDIT, just to be clear: I commented on electric cars since they are a way to consume power at the source.
Solar and wind can switch themselves off very easily, so having too much is never a problem.
In fact, having "too much" is generally the cheapest option and something every sane grid is aiming for right now.
Once you actually have too much you can start to think of clever things to do with it, but again, that's the step after having "too much" because it's cheaper.
Solar dumps tons of nearly free energy when it's sunny in summer, but produces much less in the winter, and even less on random bad weather days/weeks. ...and zero after dusk.
This has the impact of flooding the market periodically which makes financing the alternative power much more expensive.
In that environment, the plants you turn to for such rapid on/off production are burning fossil fuels.
You could also do nuclear, but there's no benefit to turning nuclear off, it actually obviates building any solar for day/summer/clearskies-only production.
This would all be obviated if batteries were cost-effective, but they aren't yet.
This is the exact opposite of the truth.
The problem you're vaguely referencing, the so called duck curve, was a problem because fossil fuel plants can't ramp as fast as renewables.
One of the many existing solutions to this solved problem was in fact to ask the gas plants to ramp a bit faster, which they actually could do, they'd just never had to before. Still not as fast as renewables though.
The real reason we turn the fossil fuel plants off when we can and only turn them on when we really have to is because burning fossil fuels is expensive and polluting.
But luckily we can quickly minimize that, and save money, by building lots of renewables. And, as an added bonus, renewables and batteries ability to turn on and off so quickly provides many grid stability benefits that earn them money on top of the electricity they sell.
I knew someone who owned a small shopping centre and years ago he'd already put solar on the roof and was charging tenants for electricity he was soon-enough getting "for free" (given the installation paid for itself fairly quickly).
Here's an example of one in Australia - panels on the shopping centre's roof, and then solar canopies over the parking areas: https://binged.it/3vKGbm5 (Bing Maps since Google Maps has older satellite images for that area)
Do they have good public transport?
There are always complaints about parking costs for hospitals (including one adjacent to this university) so that rise may have been inevitable and just muddied the issue?
What are the bottlenecks on rollout other than prohibitory regulations?
What is the reasoning for the government prohibiting solar in “Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin”?
This forced us to increase the panel array size by another 25% to 30% to make sure we had more coverage, increase the battery storage we needed, and increased the breakeven point to more than 30 years.
We decided to not do it. For a world that needs more renewable energy (I sort of hate that term) politicians work awful hard to make it not happen.
As world + dog starts driving EVs, businesses will want to offer them power charging at their venues to provide a convenient way to top up. That requires cheap power and solar is a great way to get that. The collective power of lots of businesses and consumers demanding their right to access to solar will win ultimately. It's winning everywhere else. Of course there are some places where it is taking a bit longer than it should. But better late than never.
> They typically make it difficult for homeowners or property owners to install solar and connect it to the grid, or they prohibit a third party from paying for the installation.
The "net metering" takes active work and costs by the utility to support, so some states never enacted it.
The "pay a third party" prohibition stems from existing utility monopoly rules that allow only the utility companies to sell electricity. So what they "actively prohibit" is not just solar - they actively probihit anyone but approved utilities from selling electricity in the state.
What a great example of the free market!
It’s not exclusively a GOP thing, Manchin is theoretically a D but he sure is holding back a lot of stuff in the Senate due to him being massively invested in dirty energy, but it’s more a Repub thing than a Dem thing.
But overproduction is paid at NSCR (Net Surplus Compensation Rate) which is a couple of cents per kWh [1] - a small fraction of the cost you would pay (this detail is often masked by solar companies)
So presumably there is a different framework for non-residential solar farms like these where it is, perhaps, predominately generation?
https://www.sce.com/regulatory/tariff-books/rates-pricing-ch...
Tangential, the reason that we have so much parking space (as the article mentions) is that it is dictated by law in most places how many spots are required based on the building size. https://www.strongtowns.org/parking
One hassle for those with the early tariffs is that they can't scale up their systems without revising the contract and losing their rates. Many early adopters were putting on 1-3kW systems (probably because panels were more expensive or they were not completely confident about the technology) when you'd probably put on 5-10kW now.
The main distinction between which of these two systems is better is whether you have a seasonal variation that toggles between over- and under-production. If you do not need (much) heat, or if you heat your home with something other than electricity, and your PV installation is appropriately sized, you will likely not have an under-production season, and then cash credits, even if they are below market rate, are the most desirable. If you heat your home with electricity, even with contemporary air-source heat pumps, you will likely have some under-production during heating season, and then the energy credits are a better deal (1 kWh out for every 1 kWh in).
My home is in the second category. We produce 3x more than we need in summer, and only 1/3rd of what we need in winter.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/walmart-settlem...
They don't want to lose a single shopper because they make most of their money on those days.
If people couldn't park they would go elsewhere and that would be the end of that business.
Strong towns has a very myopic view on the world and they should not be used as a source.
Why do you call that amount of parking "so much"? In general, places that only meet the legal minimum are a nightmare to park at because there aren't enough spaces in practice.
[0]: 37.42155847329576,-122.08624401157378
Probably some cost / benefit analysis went on there that we wouldn't know about from the website.
This is about to change, however.
The Lightyear and Aptera can charge up to 40 miles of range per day on their built-in solar panels, and the Sion can add about 15.
With that much charging capability, the built in solar panels can provide energy for a vast majority of the daily miles driven in the vehicles, and not just function as a backup for when plug charging is unavailable.
We know how to build green. We know what it looks like. It looks like dense, urban living. There's a reason the lowest carbon state is New York, and the lowest carbon nation per-GDP is France.
- France 0.1
- Sweden 0.06
- Somalia 0.04
- Congo 0.03
In fact a lot of countries in Europe/South America hover around the 0.1 mark.
There are simply not many other land uses that are compatible with installed installed solar panels.
And the chances of some other use is less likely if more is invested in the land.
The car and parking lots problem is a huge part issue in the US in particular. Not only is the whole concept incredibly bad environmentally, in terms of CO2 of course, but also emissions and other problems like cities being hotter and causing water management issues.
These parking lots are also a huge economic problem a symptom of the reason why so many towns are functionally broke. Encouraging cheap building for box stores or fast food restaurants with huge parking lots represents and incredibly uneconomic proposition and is losing cities money. Lots of infrastructure cost for very little in terms of property tax.
Not to mention that such a development pattern makes city centers less attractive, and that is exactly the place where cities could be making actual money. Often is actually the poorer denser areas of the city that financially support the sprawl of the richer part of the city.
So instead of plastering solar panels all over parking-lots ever effort should be made to eliminate the parking lots themselves. Infill development has to be done, and the city needs to support it with by relaxing their often borderline sociopathic zoning orders (along with a host of other harmful regulation).
Changing the development pattern would save far more energy then plastering parking lots with solar panels will ever do.
And not only will it help for the environment, things like the housing crisis in the Bay Area (and other places could be solved or at least massively impacted). Talking all the under utilized commercial zone property in the Bay Area and zoning it for mixed-use could potentially add 1000000s of housing units in the 'missing middle' segment.
See this talk on the Bay Area by City designer Peter Calthorpe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4
The organization 'Strong Towns' has made this one of its central issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM
For some more details on the economics Joe Minicozzi: The Cash Flow of Urbanism:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFC_Q4WQKVk
So what I end up with is that inside of cities you shouldn't have parking lots hardly at all, and outside of the urban environment you might as well just put them onto some empty space. Putting solar panels on parking lots will just make those parking lots an even more persistent and harder to remove in the future.
So remove the parking lot, don't buy the solar panels, invest that money in a trolley bus instead. It will be better for the environment and the city.
But LVTs do prevent just squatting and speculating more than property taxes do.
We need to drastically reduce the number of parking lots and revert the car dependency built into our cities.
“Undeveloped land is a rapidly dwindling resource”
Note - roughly 6% of the US is developed space, less than 3% of that land is urban. [1]
The author then compounds the mistrust by stating that by 2050, we might need up to 0.5% of land dedicated to generating solar power.
ZERO POINT FIVE percent. And I’m supposed to think that’s a problem? 10 million acres out of the nearly 2 billion we have in this country? Yeah - that doesn’t concern me.
It’s a shame too, as I like solar canopied parking lots and think they make sense in some cases - making such weak justifications at the top of the article though, makes me think I may be wrong about it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-10/the-real-...
Undeveloped land that people actually want to live on/near is a dwindling resource. Sure Kansas is filled massive amounts of undeveloped land but you don't see Americans rushing to move there.
So, no, there is no problem with shipping power around.
This comment reminds me of the early naïveté about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
CO2 increased from 0.03% to 0.04% of atmosphere? ZERO POINT ZERO ONE percent. And I’m supposed to think that’s a problem?
There is absolutely no need to site on undeveloped land or to take land out of production. Solar coexists well with most uses, as with parking and roofs.
A parking lot on a hot day is one of my least favorite environments to walk through, and with solar cells or not, I’m surprised more parking lots aren’t at least shaded. Stick an installation up there and you could be powering the store or mall with some of that saving on utilities, maybe charging some cars and providing that all important shade. So I’ve always been curious what the arguments against it are, and the only one I can think of is the upfront cost of such an installation.
Sorry, I should have specified: I’m looking for reasons the property owner wouldn’t want to install solar canopied parking lots besides just cost.
E.g. Walmart is famous for their enormous parking lots and large corporate campuses in the suburbs often have large parking lots too, as do outdoor malls. It seems to me they would stand to benefit from installing canopies with solar panels seeing as how they’ve already dedicated vast swaths of their property to parking.
So, "dedicated to agriculture" is no blocker for also putting solar there.
.5 percent of U.S. land would be 12 percent of already developed U.S. land, which is a lot. It’s doubtful that all generation will happen on top of that but as they point out, it’s more efficient to generate close to where power is used; you lose less power in transmission and need less land for transmission lines.
"Transitioning may create ∼4.7 million more permanent jobs than lost and requires only ∼0.29% and 0.55% of new U.S. land for footprint and spacing, respectively, less than the 1.3% occupied by the fossil industry today."
So getting rid of fossil fuels infrastructure in the USA and replacing it by renewable would give back 0.45% of land.
I wonder how they arrived at 1.3% of land for fossil fuels, my hunch is they included every gas station. Gas stations already make their profits from non-gas products and are even smaller than parking lots; many are more likely to remain a part of transportation infrastructure, as charging stations, though their size is a limiting factor due to the longer energy transfer times of electrics.
Some oil derrick and storage sites might be redeveloped for solar, ones that are less remote.
One charitable interpretation is that when discussing renewable energy with the American public you need to start by validating some of their current beliefs before sneaking some truth in, because if you just said "solar is cheap and green and we should have been building lots of it for years" you'd hit up against talking points they've been pre-programmed with.
Whereas if you start from "solar takes up lots of space and kills all biological life touched by its shadow" then they think you're one of them and you can subtly suggest that if you're already building canopies to keep the sun off of cars, then maybe solar panels would be good there?
It's analogous to pretending to believe that Covid-19 was a Chinese Bioweapon intentionally leaked from a lab, just so you can suggest to people that are otherwise beyond help that ".. and if that's true then maybe we should wear masks to prevent it spreading?".
Might help. Probably worth a go.
Also likely they improve the maintenance of whatever is under them, just from weather protection, even concrete maintenance.
But do they cover their opportunity cost?