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.
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.
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.
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.