What if we covered every warehouse in the mountain West with solar panels? | Hacker News Reader

What if we covered every warehouse in the mountain West with solar panels?

kunr.org

35 pointserehweb59 comments

There is a lot more unusable arid land in the mountain west than there are warehouse rooftops. Adding bulk commodity ground mount PV to some portions of eastern WA where there is neither ranchland/grazing or irrigrated crop would go pretty far, in addition to the already existing massive hydroelectric dams.

Look at the already government owned land around the Idaho National Lab in south/eastern Idaho for similar.

Massive scale ground mount PV on otherwise unusable already government-controlled land is less costly and faster to deploy than putting things on roofs.

People who live in the eastern or central US states and have never spent a lot of time driving around rural areas of the "Mountain west" may also not fully appreciate how much land is not owned by any one specific person or corporation, but is already owned/controlled by either the BLM or by an individual state such as the WA Department of Natural Resources. This is very alien to how rural land ownership exists in eastern US states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

I think one advantage to putting the solar cells on warehouses is that the generation is much closer to where it gets used, reducing both infrastructure costs as well as transmission loss.

True, but it also introduces new relationship/contractual/long term problems like having a whole legal team engage with whoever owns the buildings of dozens or hundreds of Home Depots or Walmarts for a 3rd party warehouse-roof-size PV installation. And eventual need for periodic repair/replacement of the underlying roof.

>There is a lot more unusable arid land in the mountain west than there are warehouse rooftops.

What a very human-centric point of view

Building a hydroelectric dam and flooding some habitat or burning conventional fuels in a traditional power plant to drive a turbine coupled to a generator with atmospheric exhaust are also very human centric points of view, exactly what is your point?

In Google Earth satellite view, go find the entire plateau of dry land wheat farming (non irrigated) on the masive plateau surrounding Waterville, WA. We have already significantly modified the desert environment there for other purposes. Look at all the square areas of wheat farming.

Go find "Atomic City, ID" in a satellite view and look at the desert brush land surrounding it for an area that's so arid that humans haven't even tried to irrigate it or do something like dry land wheat farming.

> Building a hydroelectric dam and flooding some habitat

There has been a large movement that has been working towards tearing these down due to their ecological impact. Additionally, Lake Mead has a risk of the water level falling too low and stopping power generation at Hoover Dam.

Some concerns that solar plants could have on wildlife are:

- Increased human presence in areas that previously were not frequented

- Maintenance roads will need to be built

- Migration corridors could be severed, leading to less genetic diversity in an area

- Unknown impact on wildlife. For example, maybe the solar panels make it difficult for local hawks to hunt. As of 2021, scientists have generally agreed that more studies are needed to determine this. [0]

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/Solar%20I...

Were you planning to build solar panels for the wildlife?

I certainly can't talk for the wildlife, but I would guess they would want to not lose their habitat.

Building suitable anchoring is expensive. Warehouse rooftops need little retrofitting or additional margin to add solar panels, especially on new construction. It's a nice example of synergy, the real kind and not the buzzword kind.

About 4.4% of US electric consumption:

In 2022, the USA generated 4,243 terawatt-hours of electricty.

Their proposal optimistically projects 186 terawatt-hours.

see https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...)

4% of the whole of the US consumption, just from Mountain West? That's amazing!

What happens when you add that much weight to a flat roof and then the snow comes? I'm guessing the snow load is just enough in most cases.

This is the right question. Warehouse roofs are designed to counter snow load and wind uplift at "x" mph. Once those forces are exceeded, you can expect damage.

this might be a bit silly but... maybe not... could you siphon off a little bit of power from the panels to heat an array of heating wires just enough to melt snow on impact and then it'd drip off like rain?

Not at all. Afaik you won‘t even need wires for that. You can occasionally feed energy into the panels which produces a bit of heat there. It wouldn’t even have to melt (a lot) of snow - just enough that the bulk of it slides off.

Slide off the solar-panels-on-the-flat-roof onto the flat-roof itself?

Good point, I had regular roofs in mind because that‘s the context in which I discussed that before.

Panels are typically installed at an angle

That snow will then still be on the warehouse roof though.

But I wonder if some "maintenance bot" could eventually become established that's designed around the benefits of the regular grid structure. Perhaps "walking" from socket to socket like a gravity-well capable descendant of Canadarm? Wouldn't start as snowplows, but for maintenance tasks at lower frequency, large solar parks could even make very expensive units worthwhile, and from there the magic of mass market might bring prices down sufficiently far.

Solar panels are pretty light weight compared to snow loads.

The parent comment is that the roof is designed for the structural load of the snow load and not much else. Solar panels need ballast, racking, thick teck cable, etc and can easily overload the structural design. I’ve just gone through this on a warehouse I own. Cheaper to build over the parking lot than add structural reinforcements for every column.

This is a solved problem. Flat roofs exist in places like Colorado and New York, they are just designed to the appropriate snow load and then move on

It would be a lot more expensive to put them on warehouses than the millions of acres of unused land nearby. But the mountain west also has ice and hail and solar panels tend not to live up to their expected lifetimes out here.

What are the environment effects of that?

I met a environmental biologist (it was some similar sounding job) who does environmental impact studies for solar farms in the desert. He said lots of stuff gets displaced or killed when they install the panels. There’s no way to avoid it. It definitely stresses the environment.

The biological soil crust in much of the Western U.S. is easily trampled (a single footprint can do it), and takes years to regenerate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust

I live by BLM (open public) land of this kind, and you can definitely see the change in flora growing on a given patch of land for several years after it has been disturbed.

It may look barren, but the desert West is host to all kinds of critters: multiple species of ants, beetles of all kinds, lizards, horny toads, quail, rabbits, bobcats, ravens, hawks, owls, bees, wasps, butterflies, snakes, etc. etc. Why not put the panels on the warehouses where the land is already disturbed?

To your point, it can be avoided by not doing it at all. But you’re definitely 100% going to screw up the environment by installing panels on unspoiled land.

Somewhere south of the environment effects of building tens of thousands of warehouses.

Don‘t you think the environmental impact of having both warehouses and separate solar fields is certainly higher than having warehouses with solar panels?

Not that I'm advocating for warehouses, but I'm not positive that's actually the case. Warehouses can use vertical space much more efficiently than solar panels.

But there's another consideration: albedo (reflectance of the earth's surface). If the warehouse roofs already tend to be dark-colored, solar panels wouldn't reduce the area's albedo as much as covering light-colored ground (like sand).

I saw an assertion somewhere that if we put enough solar panels in the desert to meet all of our energy needs, the net decrease in the earth's albedo would cause as much warming as the burning of equivalent fossil fuels.

A search brings up this article (not necessarily the one I'm remembering, but interesting): https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boo...

Modern warehouse roofs like a home depot or something are mostly all white or light colored to reduce air conditioning costs.

I guess because that's cheap enough, because I can only recall ever seeing one big-box type of store (HD, Target, Walmart, Supermarket, etc.) where the corrugated roof was insulated in any way whatsoever.

The sands here are black, my friend.

Solar panel albedo isn’t as bad as it first appears because they’re converting significant energy into electricity. In terms of local heat a panel that reflects 10% of the suns energy and coverts 22% into electricity is similar to a surface that reflects 32% of the suns energy.

The net effect means solar panels end up roughly similar to grasslands and between typical bare soil and desert sand or in terms of effective albedo.

Yeah but that energy as electricity produces work... which produces waste heat. You end up with the same amount of heat as you do an equally black surface just getting hot.

There's no escaping it, but fortunately all that heat gets radiated into space already on the dark side keeping the heat capture at net neutral, once the thermal reserve increases from decreased albedo of course.

“In terms of >local heat<“

That electricity isn’t producing heat where the panels are, it’s potentially in some laptop on the other side of the planet.

The actual energy released by the worlds electricity converted into waste heat isn’t currently meaningful on a global scale. But, assuming it keeps increasing placing floating solar panels over the ocean actually reflects more energy back into space. That would have a net cooling effect even including the electricity produced.

But the living creatures in the ocean need the light, cyanobacteria and phytoplankton are keystone species for the main oceanic biome.

We were talking about paneling unused dark patches on land.

We need to start getting in the habit of building large awning's over parking lots, especially with a more extreme future. Mixing electric charging stations, it'll be trivially cheap to also tack on some solar panels.

This and also making all new commercial construction require load rating for 80% panel coverage is just sensible planning.

I suspect you'd melt your grid infrastructure. They're already crumbling. If you start adding massive generation in places it wasn't designed, especially generation which can surge and dip as quickly as the weather.

The good thing about domestic solar installations is that you can pair them with small (eg 5KWh) batteries and feed back the excess to (relatively) local demand. The home then becomes a lower burden on the grid in high demand times. Everybody wins.

The answer to that question is 'It would cost more and produce less power than building out dedicated solar plants, which is what we should do instead, because aren't running out of land'.

There are certainly some places where we aren't running out of land, but I suspect super-high land values and the challenges of permitting new transmission infrastructure might make this economical closer to major metro areas.

Why would it cost more to do warehouses? Not discussed here.You could say we should do nothing except full scale land solar, stop houses for example.

There's actually a movement to block solar at farms by the Petro industrial complex, since they want to block solar everywhere.

Warehouses are not uniform. If you were to pick any of the vast millions of acres of free land in the mountain west, you could simply pick a suitable flat area near existing power transmission lines and get to work. If you were trying to develop that capacity on warehouse rooftops you'll run into a variety of problems from: (1) Some warehouses do not have rooftops that lend themselves to power generation. (e.g. they include smokestacks, antennae, vents, and other features that make some of the roof unusable) (2) It is inherently more labor-intensive (and therefore expensive) to haul solar panels onto a rooftop and install them around existing infrastructure than to put them into place in a suitably-prepared empty spot on the ground. (3) Warehouses are not situated in spots that are optimally chosen for sunlight exposure and therefore may not be very productive for solar power. Many will exist in the shadows of mountains, buildings, or trees. Others exist in places where natural forces such as ice, hail, and rapid temperature swings will shorten the expected lifetimes of solar panels. (4) The inherent costs associated (labor, logistics, materials) with setting up 10,000 small solar plants and connecting them to the grid will naturally exceed the inherent costs of setting several large purpose-built locations and connecting them to the grid.

This.

There's no good reason to couple solar panels to anything. It's some non-engineer idea that got currency - I have a house but a small yard. Hey! Put it on the roof!

But if you have any choice whatsoever, do not do that. Put them in an unobstructed cheap ground-level serviceable location near the power grid. Because electricity can flow over wires for many many miles with little loss.

Hell, the midwestern farmer used to be the highest-risk job for accidents. But I hear solar installers have taken the crown. The cost in human capital has to be considered as well.

I just want to call out that unimproved land is not free land. Someone owns it, be it private citizens, state governments, federal governments, or private trusts.

Not to mention, undeveloped land (especially land flat enough for solar) is still being used, generally for livestock.

The government owns the majority of the unimproved land in the US. The government does not own the majority of the warehouses in the US. For instance, in my state, the majority of the land (40 million+ acres) is owned by the government. Another 20 million acres not owned by the government is unimproved. The majority of both those quantities is not merely unimproved but not being utilized for anything at all - not even livestock. (It's desert - very expensive to produce most livestock out here.) And it's not even in the top five states in terms of area. In some places not far from here, land can be purchased privately for $5 / acre. I think you underestimate just how much unused land there is in the USA.

Just off the top of my head:

- Longer permitting delays, including structural engineering work and electrical design work to tie into the existing warehouse electrical system.

- Need to rent cranes or lifts to hoist equipment onto roof.

- Warehouses may need to be partially closed while roof work is being done, for safety.

- Probably need to do roof penetrations for fasteners and ensure they are sealed.

- Likely increase in worker death and injury rate from working on roofs instead of the ground.

If we're embracing solar + storage as our future energy solution we probably should be doing both. We should be building solar plants, and also supplementing it with distributed solar installs on buildings.

How does the dedicated solar installation impact the wildlife in that area?

Edit: I also wonder if there are even though sunny days in the mountain west to recover the massive carbon cost from building the solar cells in the first place. Regardless of we put them on roofs or elsewhere.

it seems easy to undervalue undeveloped land. I think the argument being made is that we have land that's already connected to the electrical grid, already has roads and routes for servicing, already has fire mitigation and contingency plans in place, already has disrupted whatever ecological processes would have been happening if it were left undeveloped, and is just missing the last piece of solar panels, which we may as well add since we've done the rest of the development process.

Thank you for saying this.

Having a grid-tied building festooned with solar panels has always seemed absurd to me for this reason. It would be interesting to calculate the implied "show-off value" of the solar cells that building owners are paying relative to the utility-scale alternative--I bet it's shockingly high.

Unconsidered options: adding solar to parking lots, ranches and orchards. That's land which is already in use, but could bear to be a bit less sunny.

Dyson sphere phase 1.

So what happens for maintenance? Does the local electric concern have an easement and keys to every warehouse in the state, so they can access it whenever they need to?

Why would they need anything like that? Rooftop solar is not a new idea; I don't see why a push to install panels on lots of warehouses would require any novel practices.

Sure, let's just seize privately owned rooftops and solar access rights for the community.

Where was there any mention of "seizing"?

> Neumann urges government officials to support solar-friendly policies and incentives that reduce the time and money it takes for companies to go solar.

I don't think you know how socialist "incentives" work.

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