These are really a great way to reclaim some power. Some times however you'll want 15' clearance so that you can drive delivery trucks to the stores under them. But overall it just makes a lot of sense. In California at least I've seen these projects get killed by squabbling between the person willing to fund the work, the management company/developer that currently has the lease rights to the location, and the underlying land owner who is leasing the land to the developer. I have suggested to my representatives that perhaps something like the "you must approve this sort of plan" laws that would facilitate California's commitment to becoming 100% renewable.
As in the picture accompanying the article, the solar shades don't need to cover the entire area. You can leave open sky over corridors to allow trucks through.
They can be built 20' off the ground, but they will always be built 2' shorter than the most important truck that needs to park there 10 years after the ribbon-cutting.
If that's really a concern, just build them with the clearance required of bridges over interstate highways, which is ~16 feet.
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.
Unlike for a bridge, having an articulation which pulls the panels out of the way adds little expense. Solar panels are light enough that keeping them still in high winds is the main constraint.
Sending 2 larger trucks to do the job if 3 smaller trucks is innately more efficient.
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.
In the case of my local (urban) grocery store, it seems to be the reverse. Coke and beer arrive on their own 18 wheelers that barely fit down the street. Produce is another 18 wheeler owned by the grocery company. Bread, fish, meat, dairy, and chips all have their own medium to large box trucks.
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.
I'm pretty sure that the areas those trucks drive through and park in can be easly determined and separated from the main customer parking lot. In the absolute worst case, you might have to dismantle some of the solar canopies when a problem appears.
Maybe all types of shelter covers will be replaced by solar panels once they're cheap and efficient enough. Canopies, roofs...
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.
It’ll go a long way towards having sizable battery capacity with an electrified vehicle fleet. But there’s also just building out electrical capacity. The industrial revolution and onward is also a story of humanity having much more access and usage for energy per capita than ever. If energy costs are low enough then direct air capture of carbon becomes a “sure, why not,” for instance. Major power infrastructure was built solely to unlock aluminum when the uses for it were discovered. Energy production capacity never dreamt of before that point.
Yes! What if we could have a post-scarcity energy society? If we generate so much energy it might as well be infinite, there is no need to economize at all. No need to worry about consumption. Direct carbon capture? Sure. Water desalinization? Absolutely. The efficiency of these processes stops mattering.
Solar power with batteries for everything, nuclear energy as backup.
The community college down the road from me has them. Couple things:
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.
I see this kind of thinking a lot. We often focus on the change itself rather than on the systemic response to the change. I used an analogy once to show how I thought about it that went like this, "The only thing Excedrin does is trick your nervous system into not reporting that you have a headache, so it's worthless?" In context people can go from 100% functional to 100% non-functional when gripped with a migrane or severe headache. The meds can mitigate the symptom and they can get stuff done that they wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.
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.
We’re all well aware of the additional factors, though some of those you pointed out (like shade for your car increasing visitation time) are a bit weak. But reality sets in and the world isn’t without scarcity yet. Therefore we have to pay attention to things like cost.
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.
I was thinking a solar canopy over the California Aqueduct [1] would be neat. Keep the sun off from evaporating the water. Oh hey, just googled that, I'm not the only one. [2]
Also as someone who is not allowed to install PV panels due to HOA restrictions, why can’t I subsidize this and own my own piece over the aqueduct, the same as if they were on my roof? This seems so obvious, to allow people like me and others who live in apt complexes to have some skin in the game.
Why do the solar panels need to be on my roof to benefit, why can’t they be over the aqueduct or in Palm Springs?
If you are in California, a 2018 law (civil code 714) makes it illegal for your HOA to prohibit solar. You have a right to put up solar even if the roof is jointly owned and controlled by the HOA.
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%.
I don't live in the US, but you guys post HOA horror stories frequently enough. How many times have we heard "I go the HOA that way, so they stuck it to me here, and here, and here". Maybe that's a bear not worth poking.
You only hear the horror stories. My HOA is very reasonable and just wants to make sure no one doing anything stupid. They don’t even enforce their own bylaws in most cases or fine people. People outside the US have HOAs they are just called something different in apartments/condos or even when the local city runs things.
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.
> Not sure why people complain about HOAs when they bought the house knowing full well what they were in for
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.
Here in the US you have lots of non-HOA options. Even in the areas with lots of HOA options you can read the rules beforehand and choose the HOA ruleset you prefer.
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.
It's about 28% of US homes which are under community associations, this includes condos and HOAs. My home is not; it's the city which gets interested in my lawn when it's looking wilder than statute dictates.
They don’t even enforce their own bylaws in most cases
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.)
I'm in the process of buying a house (closed last week) and couldn't realistically have accessed the HOA's bylaws before placing an offer. At least speaking from my experience, you don't really know what you're signing up for when you buy a house in an HOA, you just know that you're signing up for something.
They’re a standard step in disclosures and if you don’t like them you can walk away. If you didn’t choose to read them or waived the right to walk away, that’s your choice.
Any set of rules can seem reasonable on paper. It's the implementation of those rules that can vary greatly based on the HOA board. So that takes more investigation to figure out. And it is impossible to know who might be elected to the board next and who might become your neighbors next who may vote differently.
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?
In the USA, most HOAs have the ability to place a lien on your house. When you try to sell your property, you have to pay that fine or your house can't be sold. They can also file a lawsuit against you in court which the court can force you to take down whatever objectionable material you have outside your own and/or require you to pay the fine and penalties.
People talk about the HOA "fining" them, but really it's just they signed up to a contract that has certain penalties in it for non-compliance. If you don't pay, they have to go to court to collect, at least in California.
It's the same kind of "fine" that video rental stores used to have if you didn't return the movie on time.
I highly doubt condos in the EU would let you replace your door or paint the outside of your unit. Or do things like install a billboard on your deck.
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.
HOA fees for detached homes and condos are not comparable. Condo owners are paying for building maintenance in the HOA fees, while detached home owners are only paying for common area amenities.
I want to put a $100 keycode lock [1] on the front gate so that each owner can have a separate code (and I can give my code to Amazon so they can easily deliver my packages). Myself and one other person are the only full time people in the 14 unit building, the rest are all short term rentals.
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.
I'm with you. Read way too many horror stories that I didn't want to deal with it. I'm in the US and when we were looking for a new house a few years ago, one of the hard requirements was no HOA. We compromised on other factors, but not on the HOA!
So now those living in apartments are supposed to pay for solar, installation, and then what when they move? This is an insanely costly proposition that still won’t net me enough solar to get off the grid.
If you live in California your HOA can’t legally block you from installing panels.
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.
Where I live I'm a member of a coop named "Enercoop Midi Pyrénées" that uses the coop capital to build PV arrays, in the past few years 10 250kW arrays have been built locally and a multi MW one is in the pipes.
Omg yes, I really want someone to open up a solar co-op where I can buy panels that get installed on a farm and get a cut of the money produced. For anyone who rents or moves a lot they effectively can't get the benefits of solar because something like this does exist.
Bad installations make for ugly looks and can ruin the value of the entire neighborhood (who wants to live next to the guy with the odd-shaped panels on his roof?).
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.
I feel like you gave a perfectly good answer to your own question. A big program like this would buy insurance with some of the solar revenue and the investor wouldn't have to do anything.
in the Netherlands there are coops that are no more than a group that pool their money to build a 'sun meadow', and then have a share in the installation, and thus ongoing costs and returns.
I've read some horror stories about big solar installations not getting a license to be connected to the grid after installation (either because the grid is "full" or because of bureaucracy working super slowly).
Is that a problem there as well, or is that more of a local issue in some (other) areas of the country?
I don't know about Germany, but here in Belgium my house solar panels have not been working for about 2 years now. There are too many solar panels in the street injecting electricity on the lines, during sunny days the voltage goes over the ondulator's safety threshold and everything stops.
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.
Who would have thought “solar is producing way too much power” would be a problem that power companies have the legal ability to complain about...
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.
The power co's have a legal monopoly and in the vast majority of states the commission that regulates these utilities have members that are open bought-and-paid for by the utilities. Thus, they'll never realistically stand a chance unless someone came along with a bigger checkbook. There aren't many companies that want to get into the power business these days that have billions of dollars and the know-how to operate power plants and all the distribution to reach nearly every home.
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?
Now that solar panels are trending down in price it seems IMHO the real disruption will be when batteries similarly become cheap enough that homeowners may disconnect completely from the grid or at least make solar the majority of their energy supply.
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.
>Now that solar panels are trending down in price it seems IMHO the real disruption will be when batteries similarly become cheap enough that homeowners may disconnect completely from the grid or at least make solar the majority of their energy supply.
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.
It is possible you could get away with that in some places, but everywhere I've lived in the US, it is illegal to sell electricity to your neighbors. The only way around it I've seen is to give it away for free, but it is hard to build a scalable business around that.
The worst part is that it implies that the local grid is also undersized for a major power draw (Heatwave/Blizzard) since as the AC grid is essentially bi-directional the solar would have to both surpass that after the base draw of the regular buildings before the overvoltage start causing problems
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
Your panels are still working fine. Essentially, your problem is that you supplier is unwilling to invest in storage and management systems and doesn't provide inter-connectivity to the grid.
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.
You don't need a separate grid, just use a product like [1] to connect the grid to your house and a battery[2], and then connect the solar panels to the battery.
North American products pictured, European versions probably available, but perhaps from a different vendor.
Easier option is a Reliance Generator Transfer switch. Low-tech, but easy to install and can individually select which circuits are powered via solar or grid.
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.
> According to the article, a total of 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity was lost in Germany in 2020 (the latest available figure)
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.
If I understand it correctly, than it was "lost" not because there existed a general overprovision in ther European grid, but because the local grid was not able to accept and pass on what could theoretically be produced, meaning that somewhere else non-renuable energy resources were consumed instead. If this is correct, than I think it is jusified to speak of a "loss".
I think the number given (6.1 terawatt hours) is just the total of not-used solar electricity for any reason, and the reasons are probably not all that clearly delineated and distinguishable. Another factor is that coal and nuclear plants cannot be spun down just because you have an abundance of solar power for half a day. And that's not the fault of solar power, or the grid, or bad planning.
You are very probably right that many different reasons have contributed to the figure. To which percentage deficits in the grid structure are responsible I do not exactly know. But in any case, the topic plays a big role in the German mainstream media and politics. According to what I hear, the main problem is that the industrial energy consumers are predominantly located in the south of Germany, while the best locations for wind energy are at the coast in the north. This means that Germany needs a very different large-scale electricity grid for a renewable future. Past governments were rather tardy in planning,[1] so that upgrading the grid became the limiting factor for a rapid expansion of renewable energies.
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.)
It was Bavarian minister Aigner that in 2015 blocked/delayed the improved North-South connection. Environmental organizations opposed the connection completely despite the clear environmental benefits.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink#Wilster_%E2%80%93_Ber...
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.
Out of curiosity, with my non-educated guess, why cant your system drop or stop producing electricity when it overloads the system? This way at least you can power your residence with solar power and drop the excess. Of course it’s stupid of the energy grid/infra company’s inability to “buy” cheap electricity. But at least it’s not a huge loss for you.
It’s not stupid to shut off overproduction from flooding the grid just as it’s not stupid to shut off your tap when the bathtub is full. What is stupid is building so much solar that there is no where for the energy to go during peak production hours. Everybody is gung ho to put cheap panels on their roof but no one is footing the bill for adding storage without which all that power production just goes to waste.
> What is stupid is building so much solar that there is no where for the energy to go during peak production hours.
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.
Problem these days are 90% or more of the residential solar sold in the U.S. is only AC-coupled and nowadays only use micro-inverters. Meaning, when the grid goes down your solar is shut down as well. Modern inverters following standard UL1741 also will de-sync from the grid just from a signal from the PowerCo through frequency shifting to shut down your solar and require your house to go in grid-only mode (when the grid has too much solar production).
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.
> the company in charge of the grid refuse to give any compensations.
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.
Load shifting is a thing. Create the conditions for solar overproduction, and we will adapt to use it. Hot water production can be done primarily during the day. Thermostats can treat houses as thermal batteries. And batteries will likely become a lot more common. A single night’s worth of battery storage doesn’t add all that much to the cost of a house. 30 kWh of lithium iron phosphate batteries can be had for $10k.
Yes but you can't load shift over seasons. The OP is in Belgium, in Winter solar is not strong enough during the day to charge your batteries to get you through the night.
Right, the point is that overprovisioning solar is not a bad thing, and that it shouldn’t be restricted. Not saying that it’s sufficient on its own. Unless it somehow became so cheap that it was reasonable to overbuild to an extreme, and we had good energy sinks for peak times. If we became serious about direct air capture, for example, there might be an argument for it.
> compensated for solar PV generation at a separate VOS rate in dollars per kilowatt hour ($/kWh). The VOS rate accounts for solar PV's benefits to stakeholders net its costs.
Yes this is what is needed. The problem with Northern Europe is that the VOS would be so tiny people wouldn't bother.
Germany has a real problem as it doesn't have much nuclear, its main generation is still coal! Basically its desperate for any electricity at any price. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE. The solar farms (incl rooftop) is much better than households as you can build/use bigger transmission lines to those locations.
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.
Do you have a home battery? I heard about similar problems in the Netherlands, and that although there is a lot of distributed solar generation there isn’t much distributed battery storage.
As of February 2022, in the northeast USA alone, there was more than 136GW of backlogged solar capacity awaiting to be connected to the grid. This is the rough equivalent of 80-100 natural gas fired power plants
Source: google search on "PJM Interconnection Backlog"
For a layperson, this seems like such a no-brainer: you're basically upgrading open parking lots to car ports. Drivers should love that, no?
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.
> one would think it would be cheaper to build on already-developed lots, since no earth-moving and other infrastructure work is required
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
I worked at this New Jersey facility when the parking lot solar was installed. The parking availability was only minimally impacted. Base pylons were installed over a period of about a month. That involved condoning off a small section of the lot while a crew cut a four foot square through the asphalt then used an powered auger to quickly excavate for the concrete pour. As I recall the crew completed a couple of those per day. The final installation of mounting structure, panels and electrical connections was done over a number of weekends. There was no trenching involved. As I recall the construction went surprisingly fast. I spoke with one of the building maintenance supervisors a couple of months after completion. He stated they were extremely happy with the power savings and return on investment. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8458928,-74.0970349,3a,75y,1...
* edited out reference to surviving hurricane. Can't recall exact year this went up.
> Nope - trenching through a concrete or blacktop parking lot is much more work than running conduit on undeveloped land.
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.
> Also, you’ve got to shut down your parking lot for a few weeks to do the work.
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.
> parking lots I've seen around LA seemed to have an open top 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.
You don’t have to do the whole lot at once, it could be done one segment at a time. And many lots are underutilized most of the time, built to accommodate the need at peak times of year.
That means really inefficient scheduling of the different teams involved in making such a project happen. It'll drive up the cost significantly to have them start and stop multiple times, perhaps to the point of making it entirely uneconomical. Labor is already the largest cost of solar projects, after all
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.
You need to break up the asphalt for trenches, dig down and set cement foundation for the solar frames, run electrical, repave and install the panels themselves. Oh, and once the fresh asphalt is cured, repaint the lines.
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.
No, you don't need trenches. No, you don't need to repave. Or repaint lines.
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.
People driving into structures is already a solved issue in any covered parking, solar or not. We know how to build structures on steel poles that does not fall apart when people accidentally hit them with their car. You can even add steel bumpers around the poles like in any covered parking lot.
I just did an installation on my roof. We have very high winds in my area, so I went with a provider that already did a few dozen roofs in my area. I was surprised to see that the frames are not bolted to the roof, rather, they are bolted to concrete blocks which sit on pads on the roof. Each 300W solar panel feels like it weighs no more than 5 kilograms, the bolted aluminium frames look very easy to scale inexpensively. There are no trenches, rather, DC conduits run the length of the panels. I confidently hang out with my 7 year old under the solar panels for a good half hour.
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.
> Surely the first casualties of a gale or hurricane are panels.
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".
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.
You can retilt those two, three, or four times per year.
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.
It struck me as rude. But I also understand that too much time on HN (in particular) and I can get a little put off by some of the cynicism I see in the comments.
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.
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.
It is rude to troll. Solar panels have been going up on roofs for probably longer than you have been alive. Do you post "concerns" about weather for every single other thing mentioned that is outside? Wind turbines? Cars?
One reason I'm not confident in solar is there are a lot of small-scale installations, but fewer large ones. If the economics of it are so great, you'd think economies of scale and better locations would make it more cost effective than small installations. My theory about what's going on is there are tax breaks for small scale operators that make it marginally profitable on paper.
That makes sense; power utilities have lots of money, and they're going to build new plants to provide power, that's their job. As solar power becomes cheaper relative to other options and has intangible benefits too, it will increasingly become the power plant of choice. I'm not sure the efficiencies of small vs. large solar even enter into the calculus. The transmission lines are a known part of the picture and largely already exist.
Small scale costs slightly more due to economies of scale, but it also distributes the power sources and so cuts transmission costs and adds redundancy.
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.
This must be passing a tipping point. I live in a very nondescript part of Ohio and there are about 12,000 acres of land incorporated into three different solar farms proposed, approved or under construction within 20 miles of my home.
Most of the issue is around the funding model of developments.
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.
Currently, commercial solar installations can be depreciated 100% in the first year, which is a pretty strong tax incentive for developers. This is scheduled to reduce to 20% for systems placed in service after 2022. I haven’t looked at the new energy bill so not sure if it would extend the current treatment.
Generally there are no huge parking lots in crowded city centers (or, if there were, they would be shaded by the highrise buildings producing the Venturi effect, so no good for solar panels), so the problem would take care of itself. But anyway, I don't think engineering a roof over a parking lot so it can support a solar panel and not fall over is an unsolvable problem.
I agree but the OP is the one who brought up crowded city centres like that was relevant to the amount of wind. I don't understand what relationship they were trying to suggest there.
In the case of Edison Electrical Institute, your own utility might pay dues to them —- to lobby against your interests as a consumer. I think utilities are not required to report trade association dues on your bill.
No one is talking about the grid connection and batteries though. You will need batteries somewhere because demand and supply don't match.
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.
For commercial installations, demand and supply often match very well. They're not trying to get off grid but reduce bills. Whereas many homes with working parents and school age children are using power after sunset, for offices and shopping centres, they're running something like air-conditioning while the sun's up.
Where I live, home solar pays for itself in 4-5 years; for our office building, it was 3-4 years.
Repave is a different thing to build. You are changing the landscape. NIMBYists can have a say, for example.
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.
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.
Putting solar on parking lots (and of course all kind of roofs) should be so obvious, that it shouln't need to be mentioned. Besides having the area already ready, they would even improve it (shade) and the grid is in place and the eletricticy can partially be used on-site (cooling, heating, and of course, charge electric cars[1] while they park). In more northern regions like here in Germany, panels are already efficient enough when mounted vertically, as on walls, especially fences.
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.
> Another interesting option is to mount solar panels higher up with some gaps and then do farming below them.
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.
Reduced water loss is one of the chief selling points for "agrivoltaics".
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.)
Fun fact: a standard parking spot of 2.5x5 meter covered with regular PV panels will produce in a year (in my country) about 2.5 MWh which is enough to power an EV for 16000 km.
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.
I thought with higher voltage power lines, transmitting power over longer distance starts to be feasible.
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.
The dirty little secret is that there is little payback for retailers to do so.
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.
I think your point is very important. Stakeholders other than the owners (eg. Renters at apartments, condo owners within an HOA, companies that lease office space, etc) want at least some of the benefits of solar, but don’t have enough clout to do it.
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.
Walmart has solar panels over its parking lot, here.
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.
Because the cost of the panels is a shrinking part of the cost of a solar installation, but the work of the contractors is cheaper when you don't have to install them at a height where cars can fit under them.
Transmission losses might only be 5%. You can make up for that by putting panels in sunnier locations (Mojave desert vs SF) at better angles and with economies of scale. A homeowner with rooftop solar will spend more servicing panels than a large scale operator.
Michigan State University locally here did something very similar a few years back. They claim there's a thirty year payback but seeing as how we live in the second cloudiest city in America I am skeptical. However I cut them a little slack because universities are first adopters driving science forward even when the ROI isn't always there.
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!
Each of these installations could be paired with charging infrastructure appropriate for the location. Around office buildings where the typical stay is several hours, charges could exist in many or most stalls to charge cars through the work day. Retail where the stay is typically shorter would focus on rapid chargers. Some would focus on those that are shopping, others would replace the gas station on the edge of the lot.
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.
> Retail where the stay is typically shorter would focus on rapid chargers. Some would focus on those that are shopping, others would replace the gas station on the edge of the lot.
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.
Are L1 vs L2 vs L3 chargers radically different in cost? Or is it that you want to provision charging speed proportional to the power being supplied from solar at the business?
> Are L1 vs L2 vs L3 chargers radically different in cost?
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.
I wonder how this impacts carbon vs, say, eliminating the parking lot and encouraging better public transit and biking and using the reclaimed space for more housing or commerce.
I have similar thoughts. Surface parking lots are often targets for infill development of residential / commercial structures, which if built intelligently can increase density and therefore walkability / bikeability. I’d imagine adding solar panel canopies to surface parking lots increases their value significantly, reinforcing the car-centric land use pattern and making it more difficult to replace them. It is far more energy efficient to walk short distances in a dense urban grid than it is to drive long distances between buildings that are separated by oceans of parking lots.
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.
> The appeal of parking lots and rooftops, by contrast, is that they are abundant, close to customers, largely untapped for solar power generation, and on land that’s already been stripped of much of its biological value.
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.
This is a great idea, but as the article says it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen because the incentives and expertise don’t align. Moreover, big box development is usually designed on a mere 15-20 year lifespan, and very cheaply built, so a major capital project like a solar installation on the roof or parking conflicts with that model.
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.
Strange to see "aesthetic" and "parking lot" mentioned in the same sentence. Well, if there really are rules against it, then (as the article also says) citizens and businesses should pressure their politicians to change those rules.
People like trees. I like trees. Solar panels don't like trees. If you put trees in parking lots (like some cities require), it's hard to get effective use of solar panels.
N = 1, but looking on Google Maps, pretty much all major parking lots around my suburb have at least 2 (small) trees per 20 parking spaces. In most large lots, the trees occupy their own islands, but a few lots have a line of trees around the perimeter instead. IIRC, there's a county rule requiring a certain number of trees on a property relative to the land area. An least in some properties, the issue has arisen of developers placing trees too close to buildings and other structures for their size.
I rarely see significant use of trees around my home. It's unsurprising that cities mandate them because they provide shade... so if PV arrays confer even more shade, you could stop relying on trees!
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 wish, in Phoenix, they would make this a requirement on all new construction and also require old construction to retrofit in the next 20 years. We absolutely need it here, and the places that do have it, it’s wonderful.
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.
Is the precise reason there are not solar canopies everywhre because the cost of panels is not competitive with the value of the power they yield?
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.
For one, very sunny places like California are getting very close to the "too much solar" on their energy production. Until microgrids take off, this is going to be a very serious problem in the next 12-24 months. California will probably have one of the lowest kWh/$ rates in the country during summer daylight hours. But off-peak hours will be much more expensive. Adding more solar would not help in these places because it would interfere with the economics of mass power production. The investment to build power plants (nuclear or gas-fired) is too high when you can only run that plant during night-time hours but sit idle during the day. Texas has been in a similar situation, before the Feb 2021 disaster, they were giving away free power at night because of too much wind production. All of that energy production has to go somewhere and grid-scale energy storage isn't feasible just yet. If it's not consumed, then it's just wasted.
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%.
> All of that energy production has to go somewhere and grid-scale energy storage isn't feasible just yet. If it's not consumed, then it's just wasted.
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.
That already exists. It's called SREC credits. Large corporations pay SREC credits to homeowners and others to reduce carbon. Those credits can be cashed out, and many just use the money to buy more solar panels and batteries.
Challenge here is too much solar destabilizes the grid and there’s not enough peaker plants/other sources to handle to variation in generation/load.
The reason residential makes more sense is that it’s consumed at source. I don’t know the power draw needs of supermarkets but I doubt it warrants fully covered parking lots.
Residential is better because it decentralizes power generation more and puts more power in the hands of consumers.
My instinctive response: if the parking lot is too large to generate power that will be consumed at the source, it is yet another reason to consider parking lots as inefficient land use.
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.
True, that’s a good point, I had forgotten about the idea that they could be used to charge a new electric fleet which would require a lot more electricity than the supermarket alone. In that case it makes sense, the supermarket becomes the petrol pump (which it was to an extent anyway). Surely then it’s just a case of time, when the market economics make sense and supermarkets can make money out of it they will do it anyway.
Your first line is a common misconception (though the rest is solid).
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.
From an economics perspective, his first point is exactly correct.
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.
> In that environment, the plants you turn to for such rapid on/off production are burning fossil fuels.
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 would've thought that the average shopping mall is heating/cooling a lot more space (including high ceilings), a lot more often, and often during the day when solar is active and many households are empty? Large businesses run heating, cooling and lighting at times when I, being home, would not bother.
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)
Strangely, power system engineers are not complaining about destabilized grids. Solar can be turned off instantly if it were ever a problem. In the future all the grids will also have plentiful storage, and be overwhelmingly more stable than today.
Hmm, it’s anecdotal but I know several grid engineers in the UK and Europe who are employees to deal with exactly that problem and spend most of their time complaining about the instability caused to a grid that needs investment to adjust to the new reality.
Flinders University (South Australia) covered some large carparking with solar panels just a couple of years ago. The solution to the problem of funding seemed to be to get the staff and students to subsidise it through drastically increased parking fees. The idea rapidly turned from popular to unpopular, though was implemented anyway.
They're at the intersection of a couple of major arterials including the major arterial, so I'd guess public transport to be as good as anything suburban relying on buses.
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 companies in this space doing the installations and system integration?
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”?
The article says these states "actively" discourage rooftop solar, but "actively" may differ from what most readers think:
> 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.
The answer to your last question is basically “red state politicians are deep in the pockets of coal and oil interests”.
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.
re: "prohibiting solar" -- many utilities are able to convince their public utilities commission or legislature that it's in the best interest of the state to prevent competition to protect their natural monopoly.
Very much this. We were in the middle of designing and installing a total solar array for our farm when the state ended every single subsidy and electricity buyback plan. We could install all the solar panels we want, but any electricity we pump into the grid is done for free (we don't get paid) and any power we take from the grid we pay 100% for with no credit for any power we pushed upstream.
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.
It's not just in the US that this sort of thing happens. Sitting here in sunny South Africa, where we have regular rolling/controlled blackouts (load-shedding) because the utilities simply aren't able to generate enough electricity to cover all the demand. You'd think they'd incentivize people generating their own solar like crazy, but they don't. They actively punish people that push back to the grid with onerous requirements. The dirty little secret is that a lot of us have "old" "analog" electricity meters, which can literally go backwards when you push to the grid, which many do.
It will take a few years to fix that probably. But ultimately, politicians won't want to be in between companies and consumers and some very significant savings on their power bills. No public utility is that strong. It's interesting how solar panels stopped being a divisive topic between different political factions. Everybody likes saving money on power bills. And lots of people are waking up to the notion that 1) they are paying a lot for power and 2) a lot of other people they know are not because they have solar panels. It's irresistible for lots of people.
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.
This is interesting because (in CA at least) the benefit of residential solar is offsetting the electricity that you use. So use 1 kWh and generate 1 kWh, net cost is zero (Net Metering)
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?
If a large company (let's say Walmart) offered free recharging for EVs in their parking lots, that might bring more customers in. Your car needs an hour for recharging, might as well be right in front of the store.
The Walmart near us has a set of EV chargers in its parking lot that offer free charging for up to 2 hours. I bought my first EV earlier this year and I’ve definitely visited that Walmart more than I ever would before because it’s convenient to get a quick charge in and grab a few groceries, etc, I might need anyway.
Been thinking about this a lot recently, I guess the hurdle to clear is probably convincing Walmart to let you put solar panels over their parking lot. I wonder what the economics of it would be if Walmart did it themselves?
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
AFAIK this is a Solar City problem, not a solar panel problem. It's too bad that the opportunity to do this was squandered thanks to quality/installation issues.
Shopping centre owners in Australia have been completing lots of solar canopy projects lately. The incentive is to power their shopping centre and save on electricity. It makes sense here because electricity is pretty expensive, so you get ROI really quickly. You also get paid for any excess generation you put back into the grid.
Not sure if this applies to commercial buildings as well, but for homes, you get paid a pittance for feed-in tariffs. It used to be lucrative and early residential adopters got great rates locked in presumably for life but anyone since faces tariffs that get reduced and reduced.
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.
> 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.
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.
Do many places actually do net metering? Where I live, feed-in tariffs are 1/4 or less of the electricity supply cost. Net metering isn’t sustainable if you amortise the infrastructure cost over the energy supplied. Even so we’ve seen the static connection fee portion of our bill rise much faster than supply costs.
Here in New Mexico, the power company has offered two choices for grid-tied solar. (1) "credits" for surplus power production. The return per kWh is much less than the cost to buy a kWh, but for some people, that's better. (2) no payment for surplus power production, but they "bank" it and you get an energy credit to be deployed when you need extra power.
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.
Google has a couple of small canopies over parking in their campus (near B42 [0]). I vaguely recall someone saying that it was so expensive to get permits and stuff, that they just dropped the idea altogether.
While it's implied, another added benefit would be that cars in warm climates would no longer have to blast their A/C after a day of work after the sun has incinerated its interior to 120°.
WalMart lobbies hard to make sure all their buildings have basically zero value as it reduced property taxes. They will put up the cheapest possible building and invest absolutely nothing into it. They deprecate it very quickly. Investing on solar panels on the roof or the parking lot just means more investment in a specific location that they don't care about.
The approach of reutilizing existing parking lots is great, but some spots without solar panels should be reserved for the solar self-charging cars that are coming to market in the next few years:
Even with those solar cars, it would be better off for them to plug into a larger grid and set of solar panels compared to the small ones built in. The purpose of those small panels is to charge when no charging is available. In this case, if enough current and charge is available (via solar canopies and mains power) then the built in panel is useless.
> The purpose of those small panels is to charge when no charging is available.
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.
The point is they can get that days worth of charge in an hour by just plugging in under the canopy, so it’d be silly to make an exception for such a rare car.
Tbh I still don’t get it. Those cars still have plugins don’t they. Why not use the faster charging method? Those cars will never self-charge as fast as being plugged in. So that alone is a good enough reason. but yes if you were to ask me to wager I’d wager solar cars will never be a major thing, but that’s a guess to be fair.
Smarter greener move is to not have surface-level parking in the first place.
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.
Because that makes it that those parking lots will stay there for 25 more years. You want to remove these parking lots systematically from any kind of urban or even subburban environment as soon as possible. Not invest more into them. That is a far more worthy investment.
Looking at Rutger campus, used as an example in the article, https://osm.org/go/ZctEjpw05- up to 50% of the area seems to be for car infrastructure. That's a lot of area.
It doesn't imply that the parking lots will stay there for 25 more years. It implies that until it is more valuable to construct something else on that land, the PV array would remain there for 25 more years. Whether or not parking is allowed under the array is entirely orthogonal.
You can't put a building there so most likely it would remain a parking lot. Sure in theory you could have a out-door market there but that is an extreme minority case.
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.
You know what would be 10x better for society? Not have a society where half of every city is compromised of parking lots.
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.
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.
A lot of parking lots in dense cities are just property in reserve to be redeveloped. They were built 30-40 years ago and redevelopment will surely go with a parking garage because the land is too valuable to be used that way. Developers then must make decisions to redevelop (which is often limited based on finite construction workers, planners, and so on, and they are also waiting for the best opportunity, alignment with other plans in the area, etc…). No, they aren’t going to invest in solar covering for the parking lots because they won’t be around for much longer.
Absolutely. This is also true for a lot of American blight like run down strip malls in otherwise economically healthy communities. One partial solution is to switch to a Land Value Tax so that the tax structure incentivizes using land for the best use as soon as possible.
An LVT won't necessarily lead to the best outcome if plan alignment and build resources aren't considered. Say you are waiting to acquire more land before you can put a good plan into action, or are waiting for transit infrastructure or a bunch of other things that must be considered.
But LVTs do prevent just squatting and speculating more than property taxes do.
If there is no transit yet your land price will be much lower. If small land passels are less valuable then potentially that is also gone impact land price.
LVT is based on the maximum improved value of the land, not the value at current improvements. So it would include transit that could be built in the future (a potential improvement), not just transit that is built today.
Some of the points in the article make sense at first blush, and may even be correct, but I lose hope when it starts out with a complete fabrication :
“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.
I would be curious what the arguments against solar canopied parking lots would be other than the cost of the installation (due to the obviousness of that one, sometimes something just costs more than it’s worth).
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.
the main one is that having giant above ground parking lots is awful in the first place. they dramatically reduce walkability and efficiency of other transit forms (by pointlessly lowering density), are ugly, and are (other than cost) way worse than underground parking or multi-story parking garages. putting solar panels on the parking lots makes them incredibly expensive to remove.
> the main one is that having giant above ground parking lots is awful in the first place
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.
Yeah, I generally agree with the article but it's a weird kind of focus that makes it feel odd and a few claims rubbed me the wrong way too.
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?".
> Note - roughly 6% of the US is developed space, less than 3% of that land is urban.
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.
I tend to like the food that Kansas is currently using its land for, so lets just look for some other less useable land that doesn't also grow food and tends to get a lot of sun while also being at least close to the west cost. Obviously, I'm talking Nevada, Arizona, and eastern California. Seems a much more practical option
Seems like a nitpick, maybe “undeveloped but readily developable” would have been more accurate but doesn’t really change the story.
.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 am all for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the topic at hand is what’s better, adding solar on top of developed land or having it more centralized on undeveloped land (or redeveloped land) dedicated to this one purpose.
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.
Humans need to eat and farming is not very lucrative are consistent statements. Crop production is far beyond the bare minimum of what is needed; it's mostly to supply wants, not needs. As such, it's perfectly fine to trade it off against other things, like PV, that also supply wants.
'Deserts' in California are not that far away from population centers. The same goes for Texas. There is lots of unformed land around many major population centers and the energy loss from transporting energy is not actually that big.
No, you don't. There is way, way more of pasture and farmland than will ever be needed to site solar on, as putting up solar does not interfere with the other uses.
> 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
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.
Orange County public schools all have these, but does it make any financial sense given the huge investment and the fact that the panels have less than 30 years of lifespan?
You can basically rationalise against any investment, because there is no limit to your imagined opportunity. Just keep the cash always so you always have the opportunity!
The "inflation" bill that further supports the fossil fuel industry about to be passed will certainly make it more appealing in the U.S. at the expense on developing countries that get more sun. Solar is great, but subsidizing installs in Prudhoe Bay don't make a lot of sense atm.
