French senate: parking lots for 80 cars must be covered by solar panels
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In short nothing has been decided yet.
Just pave over that space with grass?
On the surface, covering parking lots with solar panels seems like a good idea since it would both generate electricity and provide shade for the cars, but I'm not sure if the same resources won't be better spent on building more nuclear plants, which is something France already leads the world in. As a driver I certainly wouldn't complain about the shade, but were I a French taxpayer I would perhaps ask more questions.
> That’s 11GW of new solar (same as 10 new nuclear reactors) powering millions of home - zero new land needed
11GW of generation on top of land already utilized and distributed.
If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF, I would absolutely ask why you’d prioritize nuclear.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
Particularly given that one of the new and growing consumers of large amounts of electricity is cars.
So I would expect to see countries with higher share of solar generation and less nuclear would have lower wholesale electricity prices than ones with less solar and more nuclear? This data isn't easy to find for a layperson like myself, but I'd be surprised if such a correlation existed.
> If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF
EDF was state-owned to begin with, and was only partially privatized in 2004 with the French state still retaining 80%+ ownership. The recent re-nationalization was only an acquisition by the state of the remainder. The French taxpayer was paying for it all along.
Any difference between marginal and actual cost results in profits for the producer rather than price reduction for the consumer.
Utilities are one of the least free markets ;-) especially in France, where EDF had a legal monopoly on generation for decades.
> results in profits for the producer
Not necessarily a bad thing; it allows for further investments in capacity and signals new capital to come in and compete. Provided, of course, that it could be a free(ish) market.
Not necessarily. Subsidies and taxes and debt throw everything out of whack as does every other form of power. You have to analyze on a more granular level than that to see the true picture.
Additionally, solar has only been the cheapest form of energy for about 6-7 years and it usually takes 10-15 years to transition away from existing energy to a new form.
In France specifically the plants were mostly built in the 70s and 80s at great expense and are paid off now but nearing EOL. Maintenance has also been neglected saving additional costs.
Meanwhile Germany has incurred most of the capital costs on its renewable generation capacity in the last 15 years.
It's like living in a neglected, crumbling old mansion with a paid off mortgage and claiming that it's cheaper than living in an average 2 bedroom semi because your outgoings are lower... for now.
>EDF was state-owned to begin with
Because unless you firehose the private sector with subsidies it'll never build an NPP.
Similarly, unless you hammer the private sector with mandates it'll never build solar panels atop parking lots?
Besides, EDF was at one point the single largest producer of electricity in the world, and France does quite well for a developed country with high living standards in terms of per capita CO2 emissions, on the back of its nuclear program. It seems at least the firehose got them results with nuclear.
I'm all in favor of abundant energy for human consumption, especially if it comes from low-externality source, but I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots, which carries with it its own externalities.
Things can be expensive until lots of people do them and then become cheap.
> I'm all in favor of abundant energy for human consumption, especially if it comes from low-externality source, but I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots, which carries with it its own externalities.
France has about 38 million cars. If there are 19 million car parks that qualify at 40m^2 each or 1.4kW, that's 26GW (so about the level you want solar at in your mix with the rest from wind/nuclear/hydro imports/etc
Clearly not coz it happens (profitably) outside of France without mandates.
>I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots
What data do you have that leads you to suppose it will make zero difference?
A quick google suggests that if all the Walmarts alone in the US did this it would provide 11GW. 11GW is coincidentally how much incoming nuclear capacity France has under construction (not enough to replace capacity going offline).
The costs for existing tech partly are sunk costs. Electricity will get produced as long as the price paid is above marginal costs.
The market for electricity also is international. There’s no need for an electricity producer in a country to sell its electricity inside that country. In Europe, there’s a single grid stretching from Portugal to Turkey, from Denmark to Algeria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...), with additional DC links to the UK, Scandinavia and the baltics.
And yes, there will be losses for long-distance connections, so electricity will be mostly consumed ‘near’ to where it’s produced, but any effect of different mixes of electricity sources will be diminished.
EDF had 50 bn euros in debt and also needs to spend unknown bns more to fix aging plants.
This means that nuclear power in France has operated with an average of at least 1 billion euros in losses per year for as long as it has existed. The costs per kWh for French nuclear power have never been correct, since they have obviously not covered the actual costs.
You are correct in that the taxpayers pay for nuclear, and this is on top of and in addition to what they directly pay for the electricity. What they pay for the actual electricity is way too little to cover the costs of nuclear.
The rest of the costs are hidden in general taxes. Everybody pays for nuclear in France, and they will pay for as long as they live and as long as their children live and so on for generations.
The same is true for coal and oil etc of course. We have no idea how much it actually cost humanity to release fossil carbon into the atmosphere, but it's pretty clear by now that it was much more expensive in reality than what we paid when it happened.
Hi, French taxpayer.
Because nuclear _is_ our future. Not unreliable solar panels made with resources that are kind of very limited in their amounts, that need to be changed every 10 years and that only produce electricity during the day. Pushing for all renewables and no more nuclear is pushing for keeping gas power plants open.
Also because holy fuck you could stack 10 nuclear power plants side by side and they'd barely cover the space needed for a single one of these gigantic IKEA parking lots. Land use is not a problem in France, we can find it.
And when it does produce (99% of the time), it absolutely crushes any amount of solar panels.
This is just false. The design life is 20-25 years, and the system on my roof is approaching year 7 with zero maintenance and no noticeable drop in output.
The inverters may need slightly more frequent changes on the 10-15year scale, but a solar panel? It's a big flat diode, guys. There's no moving part larger than an electron, and you don't need to oil electrons.
Because we have Spain and Germany next to us going for full wind and solar. Let's see how it goes and use their experience if it goes well instead of putting all the European eggs in the same basket.
Actually they going full coal and oil and gas since they need electricity and hydro suffer from drought and wind does not produce much AND in general without massive storage no grid can work on renewables...
Oh, I say that as one who have p.v., with (little) storage at home, and I see how the frequency suffer from irregular loads even at that small scale.
I very much doubt that much of that is true, at least for Germany. Could you share the source for that claim?
https://theobjective.com/economia/2022-08-04/espana-carbon-g...
"energy crisis force Spain to increment 108% coal electricity generation"
or for Germany, in English
https://reneweconomy.com.au/in-germany-a-wind-farm-is-disman...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactiv...
And also
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220620-dutch-join-ge...
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-energy-u-turn-coal-instead-of...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220627-france-may-restart-coa...
And if you were French you would knew solar output is bad there. 11GW of installed solar, equate to 2GW of actual solar output at the time of writing this comment, 16h37, due to solar outputing only 18% of the installed capacity.
Meanwhile nuclear plants are currently at 50% of installed capacity in the middle of maintenances downtimes.
Conveniently france is one of the many countries where wind is anti-correlated with sun, so add some wind and you've covered half your energy.
For solar, Net unit is not W but Wc.
You are asking to do what Germany has been doing, and they showed to everyone how bad this strategy was.
Since the 90s, more than 40% of france primary energy is low carbon.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t...
Journalists can't even get Wh vs W right.
> You are asking to do what Germany has been doing,
How was I suggesting cancelling renewables so your country's leader could get a job at a russian gas company?
Then Schroeder blocked it on behalf of Gazprom (where he is now a board member) followed by the right wing gaining power.
And Nuclear isn't low carbon for much longer (or if you expand it) because all the good Uranium mines are running dry, and mining 70,000 tonnes of ore for 1t of fuel is pretty carbon intensive.
They are still one of the most committed in europe to renewables. And still one of the worse CO2 emitter at that.
There is more than 100 year of uranium left, and thousands of years of fuel left with fast breeders reactors.
> all the good Uranium mines are running dry
Of anything, you blame nuclear for the mining, 1t of nuclear, is 1TWh, how many solar panel do you need for that ? Then how many batteries ?
(You need at least more than 100 thousands solar panel)
..with the current fleet. Renewables added about a quarter of that last year to surpass it by about 10%, and within a few years will be adding that much every year. You'd need to mine well over half of it just for a first load to replace 100% of existing electricity (then you'd have 6 years left to get the rest to refuel), then there's the rest of primary energy.
> and thousands of years of fuel left with fast breeders reactors
There are no and have never been any breeder reactors that run a full load of fuel in breeding mode and come back with more. If you believe in them then stop pushing PWRs and give the billions to terrapower or whichever breeder you're backing.
> Of anything, you blame nuclear for the mining,
Yes, because it is worse. Worse than gas. Worse than anything except coal (and if you look at Church Hill and the various other disasters that's even questionable).
> 1t of nuclear, is 1TWh
60,000t of U gets mined annually. You are trying to claim that nuclear reactors produce 200% of global electricity. Please make your lies believable or at least interesting
1t of Natural Uranium (from 3000t of ore at present, or 10,000t if you expand it) is <0.005TWh in the current fleet, maybe 0.01TWh with all new reactors.
Consider Olympic Dam. It's primarily a copper mine but is also one of the largest Uranium mines in the world (and is much higher concentration than any of the big mines outside Canada) and also produces a little silver as a byproduct.
1t of ore has 0.6kg of Uranium and 5g of silver depending on year -- which is the most destructive and most limiting resource in solar.
The 5g of silver can produce roughly 1 modern ~500W PERC panel (2 with existing technology that is being rolled out and 12 if tandem cells can be brought down in price to mass production levels) or 100-150W net for 30 years or about 2.5-4 kW-years including degradation. You still have it at the end.
The 0.6kg of Natural Uranium becomes about 50-80g of fuel depending on reactor and produces 3-5kW years of power (or down to half that if the load fluctuates too much). You need to babysit it for a decade at the end and then find a way to dispose of it.
The ore required to expand the nuclear fleet is <15% as dense as olympic dam. Mining it to meet 2030 goals will require mining a greater volume of ore than the entire iron industry and require nearly doubling world sulfuric acid production. Some mines can use ISL, but that requires even more sulfuric acid and mostly just skips the step where you pretend you're not pouring the heavy metal filled tailings into the groundwater.
Also by the time a PWR is built, odds are that metallization improvements and tandem cells will have reduced the silver requirements of the solar cells to less than what the nuclear reactor requires (it is 5-10x now, with proven tech to bring it down to 2-5x being rolled out and a tech that has passed endurance tests but doesn't have a complete pathway to commercialisation to bring it to 0.5-1x). So you haven't really reduced that any.
Wind is similar. Enercon's turbines use a small amount of copper (far less than a NPP), and some zinc but otherwise all abundant materials. They barely use more steel (regular not stainless so no chromium) than a NPP and it is all recyclable (rather than half ending up in a LLW containment area). They use a lot more concrete (about triple) -- this is far less destructive than the Uranium mining and is also going down per watt. They use a great deal of Aluminum and glass, but this is largely embodied energy (and both can be mostly-dispatchable loads), and some hydrocarbons (but negligible compared to all the fossil fuels in the 0.01% concentration uranium mine).
The NPP also needs significant (probably world-limited) amounts of indium and chromium. The enrichment facilities are all top secret so noone can check how many rare earth magnets they use or how much CFCs they emit and how much needs to be made out of exotic materials that are both strong and resistant to UF6 or other fluorides.
Nuclear is a decent tool that is worth the downsides for the few countries without good resources for at least two of wind, hydro and solar (so mostly just Poland). For the rest, either demonstrate a cheap, reliable breeder in exchange for the hundreds of billions or trillions that have been spent, or stop trying to sabotage the one solution that can demonstrably solve at least part of the problem and let nuclear keep adding the 2% share which is the most it can really provide of world primary energy.
Of course it's well known we can create solar panel out of thin air, and you just need to dig a hole to grow a wind turbine.
Solar panels are sand, silver, and aluminum with an ever shrinking steel mount that could be made from anything.
Many wind turbines use rare earths, but the fact that they live in the real world where there isn't an infinite money spigot that means the ones made almost exclusively of aluminum, steel, fiberglass, and concrete are starting to dominate.
The only resources that a mix of renewable generation requires more of than nuclear per unit of net power is silver. And the silver problem is being dealt with to the point that total consumption goes down in spite of prodiction increasing, and will be less than a PWR uses before one started now can even open.
Please at least come up with a novel lie so I can learn something new whilst pointing out how reality is the opposite of what you are saying.
Right now a new nuclear power plant in France means French jobs, French technology, and French industry. A solar panel most likely means an import from China.
IMHO this highlights the need for a country like France to invest in producing its own solar panels.
They are:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/13/french-hjt-solar-plan...
France deployed 2.68 GW of new solar capacity in 2021 [1], so this 2 GW factory will cover more than 70% of domestic demand at 2021 installation rates.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/17/france-deployed-2-68g...
But this being France, my cynical side thinks that the next step is lobbying and complaints by businesses until the government comes up with subsidies. On the other hand, that's not completely unreasonable since this new law means businesses will have to shell out hundreds of thousands of euros...
Who doesn't love spending 5x as much per megawatt hour and getting it delivered in 20 years instead of 3 months?
The answer is usually somebody who wildly overestimates how much storage is needed and wildly underestimates the feasibility of delivering that.
Which same resources?
Would make more sense to install panels in the south where days are longer and sky is clearer instead of sprinkling them around where the parking lots are.
If it's actually profitable for them already (from a risk adjusted basis), then you wouldn't need a law mandating it. The fact that there aren't many takers suggests that it won't work out well.
They don't need to. In the sunnier parts of the US, it's common for companies to install solar panels for free, in exchange for a cut of the generated revenue.
>If it is actually profitable for them already, but they're not doing it,
That's why I specifically mentioned risk in my previous comment. For instance, generating 10%/year ROI today might sound good, but if there aren't any price guarantees from the government it's possible that might drop to 1-2% a few years later. I'm not sure what the regulatory regime/economics for the solar industry France is like, but absent any evidence to the contrary I'm inclined to believe that there isn't free money lying around that companies are passing up.
So it might not be economical purely on a power generation basis, the government is giving renewables a boost with energy portfolio requirements. No idea if France has a similar system in place.
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/renewable-energy-cer...
Push vs pull in economics is identical in theory but different in practice.
Even an imagined threat of proposed new parking/driving taxes contributed to sinking Vancouver's Mayor Kennedy Stewart in the most recent election (even though he voted against new parking fees earlier in the year).
Businesses have this odd existential mandate of having to make more money than they spend, or they would disappear. This doesn't typically happen to humans, so less humans follow that rule and subsidize losses with credit.
Therefore people who want to force things that require money to implement go to who they perceive to have the money to burn.
There exist a number of companies that build out solar on a rent basis, i.e. a supermarket hands over land usage and power sale rights to this company in exchange for a payment, and the company builds and maintains the solar panels.
Lots of people build big car parks all the time, now all of them are required to have solar.
So they've created a market for businesses to serve.
Plus presumably, the French have a goal of selling more EVs, so solar on car parks is a nice synergy.
Roofs are smaller than parking lots, and it's usually cheaper to construct panels on parking lots since you don't need to work at heights and you don't need extensive certifications to make sure the added load from solar panels and their wind exposure doesn't threaten static integrity of the building.
OTOH, if a law causes fewer buildings to be built that imposes costs on society. It's harder to argue that a building that becomes infeasible due to the extra upfront costs of solar shouldn't be built.
What specific externalities are being internalized by solar panels? Or is this just a pigovian tax by forcing businesses to make money-losing investments?
Not the right wing hijack: https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/pigouvian-tax/
The "additional cost" is a clarification of the "negative externality", not a condemnation of the "tax on a market transaction". I suppose it's ambiguously constructed as a sentence and we can read into it what we will.
A carbon tax would make sense. Let's not pretend this is easy and viable to implement.
Please be patient with this comment, I do not mean it as a personal accusation.
I do not think that the point of taxes and legislation is to make more money for businesses. The point of the economy is not to make money for people or businesses. The point of the economy and government is whatever we make it. We SHOULD use government and the economy to make things better for people. There are certainly disagreements about what this means.
"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose. Regulating business is not socialist or communist or evil.
>"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose.
If you want businesses to pay more taxes (because of "their fair share" or whatever), that's fine. My only request is to call a spade a spade. If you think that businesses should be paying 1 billion euros more for climate change mitigation, enact a 1 billion euros tax. Raise corporate tax rates. Impose a levy on parking lots. Don't enact measures sound like not-taxes but are really taxes, like the legislation mentioned in the OP, or forcing them to donate to climate charities.
Two thoughts
1. It is good to put solutions as close to problems as possible. I personally believe we should be spending billions on climate change, because we will eventually anyway, and we should soften that hit. It's hard to allocate that spending though. If you make that tax functionally dependent on the thing you want to change, then the problem and mitigation are coupled. This is emotionally pleasing, which should not be minimized.
2. My personal belief is that solar panels can be made to work by people who want them to work. I call this a marginal solution. The inverse is that if solar panels are forced to be installed by people who are not motivated to make them work, then they will not work. There are many ways that solar panels may fail to deliver usable energy, from shading to upkeep of inverters and connections to replacing damaged panels; if you don't believe in solar panels, you may not fix these problems.
Except it is lower or even negative right now over parking lots because of legislative barriers and because the process hasn't been streamlined.
If it is legally mandated rather than legally difficult, and everyone is doing it, these costs reduce.
By forcing everyone to do it you break the first-mover disadvantage. The lot owner (or whoever they want to license the space to) benefits. Cities get 25% lower heat-island effect. Customers get cooler cars. Less productive land is used.
Everyone wins, and the law has an 'economically untenable' clause for people in the shade of a highrise or with trees or existing shade sails or similar.
They are built because they are needed, and regulations do not make it easy to build more of them. They also do not really "impose costs" on society.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.829154,1.9661837,3a,75y,21...
But let's be honest and realistic: thousands and thousands of people are not going to squeeze into buses for hours to go shopping in places like the one I linked to, which are usually already served by public transport.
Well, in France there are not enough parking spots already. Office buildings with less than a spot per 10 workers are the norm. Most old housing in cities don't offer any parking spot. It's not for nothing one of the ways to get started on the property ladder are parking spots.
This is not the government. It is in a law made by the parlement, aimed at accelerating the installation of renewable energy.
> If all you want is solar capacity, wouldn't roofs be better because you don't need the support structures/lights?
While not mandatory, there is already some heavy tax incentive to install solar panel on new buildings. While this is more challenging for housing, you will find that most warehouse are now built with solar panel on the roof. But retrofitting old warehouse, or any building really, with solar panel is more complicated has most of them don't have the structure to support the weight of the solar panel.
> Is there some additional benefits of solar panels on parking lots that I'm missing, that requires government intervention to work?
Not really but they tend to take a lot of area (compare to most urban building who are more vertical and have a lesser m2 footprint) so they are a good candidate to install solar panel. It also has the benefit of shading the car, reducing the power draw of the A/C when the car start in the summer (although it has the opposite effect in winter I suppose). But also, massive (80+ car park is considered quite big in France) parking are usually the beneficiary (and enabler) of a car centric culture, which create a lot of co2, so they should contribute.
Yes a nuclear plant can generate all this power, but you have to ship it around. Local power sources (DC charging from DC panel arrays) could prove very effective.
It's also interesting that France, home of nuclear, is doing this - probably linked to the extent to which their nuclear plants are offline simultaneously for maintenance and they're having to import power.
I can't for the life of me find the albedo of solar panels of various types (people just assume it's zero which is patently untrue because it's much more visible than black paint at 0.05). A completely made up guess would be around 0.05-0.2 (they look lighter than asphalt except for topcon) so my guess would be 17-34% better (or ballpark same as greenery).
i doubt the cheapest or the most expensive panels are that point.
Durable plywood with a finish that doesn't scare customers away is not going to be much less and doesn't make €20 worth of electricity a year.
Also you need calculator panels across 50% of it according to the law.
If you're going to pay €30/m^2 for the support structure, why not add a real panel and some real inverters to pay the whole thing off in 8 years? Plus you'll attract wealthy EV early adopters.
This is either a coincidence, or a very clever and perfectly timed move to provide a perfect market for the development of perovskites (which may wind up cost competitive with shade sails) while they're still too inefficient and unreliable to justify the cost of land, and hasten the transition to tandem cells by a few years.
paying for all of the work to build a plywood solar farm, and then _never_ _getting_ _anything_ _back_ would've been profoundly negative.
you're thinking about the first day after the install. _sure_ it _might_ cost less to install a bunch of plywood. and then you never get anything for it. and nobody will give you a business loan for "i want to install fake solar panels", but "i want to install actual solar panels" has all sorts of cheap money thrown at it.
over the life of the system installing actual panels has a shot at paying for itself.
Sad fact, the whole thing belongs to AXPO, a large Swiss state owned company that is supposed to ensure many places in Switzerland have enough electricity but instead invests heavily in foreign green energy...
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwMEtuL-GQ
. . .