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Comment by jyounker | Hacker News Reader

I'm an American, and it seems like a great use of land to me. This sort of a policy is particularly sensible in areas where it's hot, and there are extensive parking lots next to places that are mostly active during the day.

Instead of just having a heat island, you generate power to run AC in the associated buildings, and you also get shade for the parked cars.

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I recently was at the Vegas airport, and what struck me was the parking lot.

It was the same parking lot I saw many years ago. But this time, instead of feeling sorry for the owners of the cars that were obviously getting cooked up, that whole are was shaded in bajillion solar panels.

It seemed like such an obvious win-win for everyone, I expect it to catch on fairly quickly.

But, isn't the albedo of a solar panel farm still way dark? It means the radiation is still being captured rather than reflected back up.

Capturing the radiation to convert it to electricity is the whole point of solar panels.

Even if it was just 0 albedo no generation, irradiation on whatever's parked beneath would be cut in half plus rest of (re-)radiation converted into far-ir. This is not unuseful. Just don't mandate this kind of thing in places where parking lots have to be cleaned up with bulldozers in winter.

If there are solar panels over the parking lot, then the parking lot doesn't have to be plowed. You can design the panels at appropriate slopes to direct the snow off the lot.

You're not looking at the albedo of the solar panels in isolation though, you're comparing it to asphalt and cars. Typical solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05.

There's a reason centrally planned economies are abject failures. People are incapable of anticipating all of the cascading effects of a "sensible" policy

Well, yeah, that's how we got cities with a huge amount of land dedicated to economically parasitic parking lots in the first place.

That seems like a confirmation of the point more than a refutation. The parking lot problem is not a free market phenomenon, it's a result of regulation's unintended side effects.

This is also a feature of distributed economies; it’s just the communication overhead to make a change centrally means that bad decisions are less easily repaired. AI and electronic data feeds seriously could be tried to fix this. There are good advantages to a centralized economy… the trick is getting the objective function right.

And it’s not like modern capitalism has done a good job of that anyhow.

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