Note that this law has only been voted by the Senate, and not the "Assemblée nationale". For a law to be adopted in France it must be voted in both chambers. And the "Assemblée nationale" has much more political power.
Yes, and signed by the President. However the sequence is usually assemblee nationale and then sénat. Hence when it passes sénat (they do not hold a lot of power actually), it can be scheduled to be signed and published.
On the surface, covering parking lots with solar panels seems like a good idea since it would both generate electricity and provide shade for the cars, but I'm not sure if the same resources won't be better spent on building more nuclear plants, which is something France already leads the world in. As a driver I certainly wouldn't complain about the shade, but were I a French taxpayer I would perhaps ask more questions.
These are the same nuclear power plants they have a challenge maintaining adequately and building new ones, yeah? And take a decade to build? And solar and batteries are cheaper than nuclear on a levelized per kWh basis. So slap the panels on top of mandatory carports and call it a day.
> That’s 11GW of new solar (same as 10 new nuclear reactors) powering millions of home - zero new land needed
11GW of generation on top of land already utilized and distributed.
If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF, I would absolutely ask why you’d prioritize nuclear.
And if you were French you would knew solar output is bad there.
11GW of installed solar, equate to 2GW of actual solar output at the time of writing this comment, 16h37, due to solar outputing only 18% of the installed capacity.
Meanwhile nuclear plants are currently at 50% of installed capacity in the middle of maintenances downtimes.
Presumably that 11GW is net. France has around 38 million cars. America has around 8 parking spots per car. Assuming there are enough spots that fall under this scheme for 0.5 surface parking spaces per car at the average of 40m^2 per spot that's around 26GW net at 14% capacity or about the same as the current nuclear fleet.
Conveniently france is one of the many countries where wind is anti-correlated with sun, so add some wind and you've covered half your energy.
Germany cancelled and closed lot of nuclear plants to go "fully renewable" years ago, as it's not possible today, they compensated lack of base-load with natural gas, and bought France electricity in the winter (well, sun is not strong in the winter).
Then Schroeder blocked it on behalf of Gazprom (where he is now a board member) followed by the right wing gaining power.
And Nuclear isn't low carbon for much longer (or if you expand it) because all the good Uranium mines are running dry, and mining 70,000 tonnes of ore for 1t of fuel is pretty carbon intensive.
..with the current fleet. Renewables added about a quarter of that last year to surpass it by about 10%, and within a few years will be adding that much every year. You'd need to mine well over half of it just for a first load to replace 100% of existing electricity (then you'd have 6 years left to get the rest to refuel), then there's the rest of primary energy.
> and thousands of years of fuel left with fast breeders reactors
There are no and have never been any breeder reactors that run a full load of fuel in breeding mode and come back with more. If you believe in them then stop pushing PWRs and give the billions to terrapower or whichever breeder you're backing.
> Of anything, you blame nuclear for the mining,
Yes, because it is worse. Worse than gas. Worse than anything except coal (and if you look at Church Hill and the various other disasters that's even questionable).
> 1t of nuclear, is 1TWh
60,000t of U gets mined annually. You are trying to claim that nuclear reactors produce 200% of global electricity. Please make your lies believable or at least interesting
1t of Natural Uranium (from 3000t of ore at present, or 10,000t if you expand it) is <0.005TWh in the current fleet, maybe 0.01TWh with all new reactors.
Consider Olympic Dam. It's primarily a copper mine but is also one of the largest Uranium mines in the world (and is much higher concentration than any of the big mines outside Canada) and also produces a little silver as a byproduct.
1t of ore has 0.6kg of Uranium and 5g of silver depending on year -- which is the most destructive and most limiting resource in solar.
The 5g of silver can produce roughly 1 modern ~500W PERC panel (2 with existing technology that is being rolled out and 12 if tandem cells can be brought down in price to mass production levels) or 100-150W net for 30 years or about 2.5-4 kW-years including degradation. You still have it at the end.
The 0.6kg of Natural Uranium becomes about 50-80g of fuel depending on reactor and produces 3-5kW years of power (or down to half that if the load fluctuates too much). You need to babysit it for a decade at the end and then find a way to dispose of it.
The ore required to expand the nuclear fleet is <15% as dense as olympic dam. Mining it to meet 2030 goals will require mining a greater volume of ore than the entire iron industry and require nearly doubling world sulfuric acid production. Some mines can use ISL, but that requires even more sulfuric acid and mostly just skips the step where you pretend you're not pouring the heavy metal filled tailings into the groundwater.
Also by the time a PWR is built, odds are that metallization improvements and tandem cells will have reduced the silver requirements of the solar cells to less than what the nuclear reactor requires (it is 5-10x now, with proven tech to bring it down to 2-5x being rolled out and a tech that has passed endurance tests but doesn't have a complete pathway to commercialisation to bring it to 0.5-1x). So you haven't really reduced that any.
Wind is similar. Enercon's turbines use a small amount of copper (far less than a NPP), and some zinc but otherwise all abundant materials. They barely use more steel (regular not stainless so no chromium) than a NPP and it is all recyclable (rather than half ending up in a LLW containment area). They use a lot more concrete (about triple) -- this is far less destructive than the Uranium mining and is also going down per watt. They use a great deal of Aluminum and glass, but this is largely embodied energy (and both can be mostly-dispatchable loads), and some hydrocarbons (but negligible compared to all the fossil fuels in the 0.01% concentration uranium mine).
The NPP also needs significant (probably world-limited) amounts of indium and chromium. The enrichment facilities are all top secret so noone can check how many rare earth magnets they use or how much CFCs they emit and how much needs to be made out of exotic materials that are both strong and resistant to UF6 or other fluorides.
Nuclear is a decent tool that is worth the downsides for the few countries without good resources for at least two of wind, hydro and solar (so mostly just Poland). For the rest, either demonstrate a cheap, reliable breeder in exchange for the hundreds of billions or trillions that have been spent, or stop trying to sabotage the one solution that can demonstrably solve at least part of the problem and let nuclear keep adding the 2% share which is the most it can really provide of world primary energy.
> Yes, because it is worse. Worse than gas. Worse than anything except coal (and if you look at Church Hill and the various other disasters that's even questionable).
Of course it's well known we can create solar panel out of thin air, and you just need to dig a hole to grow a wind turbine.
Maybe read the rest of the comment before coming out with the embarassingly predictable reactionary drivel that I already addressed in detail?
Solar panels are sand, silver, and aluminum with an ever shrinking steel mount that could be made from anything.
Many wind turbines use rare earths, but the fact that they live in the real world where there isn't an infinite money spigot that means the ones made almost exclusively of aluminum, steel, fiberglass, and concrete are starting to dominate.
The only resources that a mix of renewable generation requires more of than nuclear per unit of net power is silver. And the silver problem is being dealt with to the point that total consumption goes down in spite of prodiction increasing, and will be less than a PWR uses before one started now can even open.
Please at least come up with a novel lie so I can learn something new whilst pointing out how reality is the opposite of what you are saying.
Something mentioned in the French article quoted by the tweet is industrial policy.
Right now a new nuclear power plant in France means French jobs, French technology, and French industry. A solar panel most likely means an import from China.
IMHO this highlights the need for a country like France to invest in producing its own solar panels.
France deployed 2.68 GW of new solar capacity in 2021 [1], so this 2 GW factory will cover more than 70% of domestic demand at 2021 installation rates.
> If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF, I would absolutely ask why you’d prioritize nuclear.
Because we have Spain and Germany next to us going for full wind and solar. Let's see how it goes and use their experience if it goes well instead of putting all the European eggs in the same basket.
> Spain and Germany next to us going for full wind and solar.
Actually they going full coal and oil and gas since they need electricity and hydro suffer from drought and wind does not produce much AND in general without massive storage no grid can work on renewables...
Oh, I say that as one who have p.v., with (little) storage at home, and I see how the frequency suffer from irregular loads even at that small scale.
> Actually they going full coal and oil and gas since they need electricity and hydro suffer from drought and wind does not produce much AND in general without massive storage no grid can work on renewables...
I very much doubt that much of that is true, at least for Germany. Could you share the source for that claim?
> And solar and batteries are cheaper than nuclear on a levelized per kWh basis
So I would expect to see countries with higher share of solar generation and less nuclear would have lower wholesale electricity prices than ones with less solar and more nuclear? This data isn't easy to find for a layperson like myself, but I'd be surprised if such a correlation existed.
> If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF
EDF was state-owned to begin with, and was only partially privatized in 2004 with the French state still retaining 80%+ ownership. The recent re-nationalization was only an acquisition by the state of the remainder. The French taxpayer was paying for it all along.
You will not see lower prices because the true costs of nuclear are hidden in centuries to come and not included in the costs shown today. Nobody presents the actual cost of nuclear because nobody knows. Estimating costs even decades in the future is impossible, let alone centuries.
EDF had 50 bn euros in debt and also needs to spend unknown bns more to fix aging plants.
This means that nuclear power in France has operated with an average of at least 1 billion euros in losses per year for as long as it has existed. The costs per kWh for French nuclear power have never been correct, since they have obviously not covered the actual costs.
You are correct in that the taxpayers pay for nuclear, and this is on top of and in addition to what they directly pay for the electricity. What they pay for the actual electricity is way too little to cover the costs of nuclear.
The rest of the costs are hidden in general taxes. Everybody pays for nuclear in France, and they will pay for as long as they live and as long as their children live and so on for generations.
The same is true for coal and oil etc of course. We have no idea how much it actually cost humanity to release fossil carbon into the atmosphere, but it's pretty clear by now that it was much more expensive in reality than what we paid when it happened.
>So I would expect to see countries with higher share of solar generation and less nuclear would have lower wholesale electricity prices than ones with less solar and more nuclear?
Not necessarily. Subsidies and taxes and debt throw everything out of whack as does every other form of power. You have to analyze on a more granular level than that to see the true picture.
Additionally, solar has only been the cheapest form of energy for about 6-7 years and it usually takes 10-15 years to transition away from existing energy to a new form.
In France specifically the plants were mostly built in the 70s and 80s at great expense and are paid off now but nearing EOL. Maintenance has also been neglected saving additional costs.
Meanwhile Germany has incurred most of the capital costs on its renewable generation capacity in the last 15 years.
It's like living in a neglected, crumbling old mansion with a paid off mortgage and claiming that it's cheaper than living in an average 2 bedroom semi because your outgoings are lower... for now.
>EDF was state-owned to begin with
Because unless you firehose the private sector with subsidies it'll never build an NPP.
> Because unless you firehose the private sector with subsidies it'll never build an NPP
Similarly, unless you hammer the private sector with mandates it'll never build solar panels atop parking lots?
Besides, EDF was at one point the single largest producer of electricity in the world, and France does quite well for a developed country with high living standards in terms of per capita CO2 emissions, on the back of its nuclear program. It seems at least the firehose got them results with nuclear.
I'm all in favor of abundant energy for human consumption, especially if it comes from low-externality source, but I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots, which carries with it its own externalities.
> Similarly, unless you hammer the private sector with mandates it'll never build solar panels atop parking lots?
Things can be expensive until lots of people do them and then become cheap.
> I'm all in favor of abundant energy for human consumption, especially if it comes from low-externality source, but I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots, which carries with it its own externalities.
France has about 38 million cars. If there are 19 million car parks that qualify at 40m^2 each or 1.4kW, that's 26GW (so about the level you want solar at in your mix with the rest from wind/nuclear/hydro imports/etc
>Similarly, unless you hammer the private sector with mandates it'll never build solar panels atop parking lots?
Clearly not coz it happens (profitably) outside of France without mandates.
>I do question how much the needle is going to move by mandating solar panels on parking lots
What data do you have that leads you to suppose it will make zero difference?
A quick google suggests that if all the Walmarts alone in the US did this it would provide 11GW. 11GW is coincidentally how much incoming nuclear capacity France has under construction (not enough to replace capacity going offline).
> So I would expect to see countries with higher share of solar generation and less nuclear would have lower wholesale electricity prices than ones with less solar and more nuclear?
The costs for existing tech partly are sunk costs. Electricity will get produced as long as the price paid is above marginal costs.
The market for electricity also is international. There’s no need for an electricity producer in a country to sell its electricity inside that country. In Europe, there’s a single grid stretching from Portugal to Turkey, from Denmark to Algeria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...), with additional DC links to the UK, Scandinavia and the baltics.
And yes, there will be losses for long-distance connections, so electricity will be mostly consumed ‘near’ to where it’s produced, but any effect of different mixes of electricity sources will be diminished.
Utilities are one of the least free markets ;-) especially in France, where EDF had a legal monopoly on generation for decades.
> results in profits for the producer
Not necessarily a bad thing; it allows for further investments in capacity and signals new capital to come in and compete. Provided, of course, that it could be a free(ish) market.
>If I were a French taxpayer who just paid €10B to nationalize EDF, I would absolutely ask why you’d prioritize nuclear.
Hi, French taxpayer.
Because nuclear _is_ our future. Not unreliable solar panels made with resources that are kind of very limited in their amounts, that need to be changed every 10 years and that only produce electricity during the day. Pushing for all renewables and no more nuclear is pushing for keeping gas power plants open.
Also because holy fuck you could stack 10 nuclear power plants side by side and they'd barely cover the space needed for a single one of these gigantic IKEA parking lots. Land use is not a problem in France, we can find it.
This is just false. The design life is 20-25 years, and the system on my roof is approaching year 7 with zero maintenance and no noticeable drop in output.
The inverters may need slightly more frequent changes on the 10-15year scale, but a solar panel? It's a big flat diode, guys. There's no moving part larger than an electron, and you don't need to oil electrons.
On the surface this will not cost anything to the taxpayer since the cost will be borne by the carparks' owners.
But this being France, my cynical side thinks that the next step is lobbying and complaints by businesses until the government comes up with subsidies. On the other hand, that's not completely unreasonable since this new law means businesses will have to shell out hundreds of thousands of euros...
Why not both?
Here it is the company owning the parking lot which is impacted, and it will generate money in three long run for them.
There is no relation with a budget required to build a nuclear reactor
also, there is a presumption that all parking lots make good solar installations throughout all of France. I'm sure there are a number of "parking lots" which are little more than dirt fields for events in remote locations.
And there are rainy parts of France. Been in Paris in January… didn’t see the sun for 2 continuous weeks.
Would make more sense to install panels in the south where days are longer and sky is clearer instead of sprinkling them around where the parking lots are.
Perhaps, but this is probably aimed at really big car parks like shopping malls that have a capacity of far more than 80 cars. They won't be able to get around this so easily. Presumably companies that build these solar panels will be paid for any electricity generated, so it might work out quite well for them in the long term.
> Presumably companies that build these solar panels will be paid for any electricity generated, so it might work out quite well for them in the long term.
If it's actually profitable for them already (from a risk adjusted basis), then you wouldn't need a law mandating it. The fact that there aren't many takers suggests that it won't work out well.
Companies are surprisingly good at avoiding opportunities they're not familiar with. If it is actually profitable for them already, but they're not doing it, then a law mandating it may still be a good idea.
>Companies are surprisingly good at avoiding opportunities they're not familiar with
They don't need to. In the sunnier parts of the US, it's common for companies to install solar panels for free, in exchange for a cut of the generated revenue.
>If it is actually profitable for them already, but they're not doing it,
That's why I specifically mentioned risk in my previous comment. For instance, generating 10%/year ROI today might sound good, but if there aren't any price guarantees from the government it's possible that might drop to 1-2% a few years later. I'm not sure what the regulatory regime/economics for the solar industry France is like, but absent any evidence to the contrary I'm inclined to believe that there isn't free money lying around that companies are passing up.
Note that some of the "generated revenue" is not from selling the generated power but from selling Renewable Energy Credits, which allow power companies to claim your solar as part of their energy generation mix.
So it might not be economical purely on a power generation basis, the government is giving renewables a boost with energy portfolio requirements. No idea if France has a similar system in place.
Recall that Texas of all places leads the US in renewables integration. It's definitely not because of mandates, it's because their environment makes wind and solar profitable for the energy companies... Provided there's no major winter storms to break their back up generation
A lot of viable markets need bootstrapping. Being the first to do something always costs a lot more than being the second. This law ensured that a bunch of companies are going to start up to serve this market using volume vs bespoke mechanisms.
Push vs pull in economics is identical in theory but different in practice.
What bootstrapping is needed for solar? From what I've seen it's a pretty labor intensive business that lends itself well to small scale contractors. Only a modest amount of investment (eg. electrician's tools) is needed. The parts themselves (eg. panels/inverters) are already mass produced and imported from china.
This would be the best approach, but sadly in reality people will elect politicians with their sole aim of reducing any and all taxation, no matter how reasonable and needed.
Even an imagined threat of proposed new parking/driving taxes contributed to sinking Vancouver's Mayor Kennedy Stewart in the most recent election (even though he voted against new parking fees earlier in the year).
And a bunch of people working hard to show that, indeed, there ought to be eighty parking spaces, but one of them isn't marked, so the owner will need to retroactively install solar panels at great cost.
Time to get in the line painting business in france. Parking spots will be much much larger. They should have used Sq/ft or Sq/meter as the determining factor.
I think he meant the other option, if done by square meter. Then suddenly you have what would have been an 80 spot lot, is now a 90 spot lot, and a lot of dinged doors.
Think GP is saying that if lot owners are forced to bear the cost of installing solar panels, this could encourage them to squeeze more spaces in. It could be that France has some regulations on car parking space size which would prevent this, however
What's the point of legislating on parking lots specifically? If all you want is solar capacity, wouldn't roofs be better because you don't need the support structures/lights? The whole thing reeks of "government has a cool idea and mandates it by decree". Is there some additional benefits of solar panels on parking lots that I'm missing, that requires government intervention to work?
Parking lots have lots of externalities not borne by the parking lot owner. This is an attempt to internalize some of those externalities to make the system more economically efficient. If this causes fewer parking lots to be built the system is more efficient, not less. Marginal parking lots shouldn't be built, only the ones that are truly needed.
OTOH, if a law causes fewer buildings to be built that imposes costs on society. It's harder to argue that a building that becomes infeasible due to the extra upfront costs of solar shouldn't be built.
> This is an attempt to internalize some of those externalities to make the system more economically efficient.
What specific externalities are being internalized by solar panels? Or is this just a pigovian tax by forcing businesses to make money-losing investments?
> forcing businesses to make money-losing investments?
Please be patient with this comment, I do not mean it as a personal accusation.
I do not think that the point of taxes and legislation is to make more money for businesses. The point of the economy is not to make money for people or businesses. The point of the economy and government is whatever we make it. We SHOULD use government and the economy to make things better for people. There are certainly disagreements about what this means.
"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose. Regulating business is not socialist or communist or evil.
>We SHOULD use government and the economy to make things better for people. There are certainly disagreements about what this means.
>"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose.
If you want businesses to pay more taxes (because of "their fair share" or whatever), that's fine. My only request is to call a spade a spade. If you think that businesses should be paying 1 billion euros more for climate change mitigation, enact a 1 billion euros tax. Raise corporate tax rates. Impose a levy on parking lots. Don't enact measures sound like not-taxes but are really taxes, like the legislation mentioned in the OP, or forcing them to donate to climate charities.
1. It is good to put solutions as close to problems as possible. I personally believe we should be spending billions on climate change, because we will eventually anyway, and we should soften that hit. It's hard to allocate that spending though. If you make that tax functionally dependent on the thing you want to change, then the problem and mitigation are coupled. This is emotionally pleasing, which should not be minimized.
2. My personal belief is that solar panels can be made to work by people who want them to work. I call this a marginal solution. The inverse is that if solar panels are forced to be installed by people who are not motivated to make them work, then they will not work. There are many ways that solar panels may fail to deliver usable energy, from shading to upkeep of inverters and connections to replacing damaged panels; if you don't believe in solar panels, you may not fix these problems.
Except it is lower or even negative right now over parking lots because of legislative barriers and because the process hasn't been streamlined.
If it is legally mandated rather than legally difficult, and everyone is doing it, these costs reduce.
By forcing everyone to do it you break the first-mover disadvantage. The lot owner (or whoever they want to license the space to) benefits. Cities get 25% lower heat-island effect. Customers get cooler cars. Less productive land is used.
Everyone wins, and the law has an 'economically untenable' clause for people in the shade of a highrise or with trees or existing shade sails or similar.
If you think the problem is carbon emissions, you should tax carbon emissions (ie. carbon tax). That way it covers everything, not just the ones that receive enough public attention, and there's an incentive to come up with greener paving materials. Right now you're forced to pay the same costs (ie. solar panel coverings) regardless if you're using concrete (max co2) or bricks (minimum co2?)
It pretends that the costs will be borne by people outside of the transaction at all times, therefore continuing the right wing myth that any government intervention will increase costs for the final consumer.
Here is their definition: "A Pigouvian tax [...] is a tax on a market transaction that creates a negative externality, or an additional cost, borne by individuals not directly involved in the transaction."
The "additional cost" is a clarification of the "negative externality", not a condemnation of the "tax on a market transaction". I suppose it's ambiguously constructed as a sentence and we can read into it what we will.
France is not the US, covered in car parks. Those large, open-air car parks are pretty much exclusively located at the out-of-town shopping areas/malls (say where your local Ikea is located, 'zones commerciales' in French like, for instance, this beauty [1]) and out-of-town large office campuses.
They are built because they are needed, and regulations do not make it easy to build more of them. They also do not really "impose costs" on society.
I would argue that they are not needed. In some country (ex: Turkey), commercial center / zone (but also big companies) operate their own bus services to allow their customer to come without car even when they are out of town and far from public transportation. Maybe that's an idea they should take.
Some (large) companies have bus services. Often that's to do the connection between a train station and their office.
But let's be honest and realistic: thousands and thousands of people are not going to squeeze into buses for hours to go shopping in places like the one I linked to, which are usually already served by public transport.
> Marginal parking lots shouldn't be built, only the ones that are truly needed.
Well, in France there are not enough parking spots already. Office buildings with less than a spot per 10 workers are the norm. Most old housing in cities don't offer any parking spot. It's not for nothing one of the ways to get started on the property ladder are parking spots.
Businesses have this odd existential mandate of having to make more money than they spend, or they would disappear. This doesn't typically happen to humans, so less humans follow that rule and subsidize losses with credit.
Therefore people who want to force things that require money to implement go to who they perceive to have the money to burn.
> Therefore people who want to force things that require money to implement go to who they perceive to have the money to burn.
There exist a number of companies that build out solar on a rent basis, i.e. a supermarket hands over land usage and power sale rights to this company in exchange for a payment, and the company builds and maintains the solar panels.
how is it a synergy? the solar panels will necessarily feed into the grid (because electricity must be transported for immediate consumption), and not necessarily into EVs (since it can be sunny when no cars are here to recharge, or EVs need recharging at night when there's no sun). Only rarely will the electricity collected by the panels feed directly into the EVs.
So IMHO not a synergy, it is merely co-location of the 2 (which is good, since parking lots are mostly unused space, now this space will in fact do something when not in-use for car parking).
Combined PV inverters and EV chargers can be 20% more efficient by staying in DC instead of a double conversion and let you fast charge by using grid power and solar simultaneously.
> "government has a cool idea and mandates it by decree"
This is not the government. It is in a law made by the parlement, aimed at accelerating the installation of renewable energy.
> If all you want is solar capacity, wouldn't roofs be better because you don't need the support structures/lights?
While not mandatory, there is already some heavy tax incentive to install solar panel on new buildings. While this is more challenging for housing, you will find that most warehouse are now built with solar panel on the roof. But retrofitting old warehouse, or any building really, with solar panel is more complicated has most of them don't have the structure to support the weight of the solar panel.
> Is there some additional benefits of solar panels on parking lots that I'm missing, that requires government intervention to work?
Not really but they tend to take a lot of area (compare to most urban building who are more vertical and have a lesser m2 footprint) so they are a good candidate to install solar panel. It also has the benefit of shading the car, reducing the power draw of the A/C when the car start in the summer (although it has the opposite effect in winter I suppose). But also, massive (80+ car park is considered quite big in France) parking are usually the beneficiary (and enabler) of a car centric culture, which create a lot of co2, so they should contribute.
> If all you want is solar capacity, wouldn't roofs be better because you don't need the support structures/lights?
Roofs are smaller than parking lots, and it's usually cheaper to construct panels on parking lots since you don't need to work at heights and you don't need extensive certifications to make sure the added load from solar panels and their wind exposure doesn't threaten static integrity of the building.
This makes a lot of sense on the surface. Protect the cars and people from rain and sun, and generate electricity at the same time, using no additional land.
Detractors seem too focused on current energy usage and lack the foresight to consider the grid impact of a carpark full of cars wanting a top-up charge during the daytime.
Yes a nuclear plant can generate all this power, but you have to ship it around. Local power sources (DC charging from DC panel arrays) could prove very effective.
Does anyone know what the reduced heating effect is of solar panels vs tarmac? Intuitively I'd have thought it was about 20%, the amount of energy extracted for use.
It's also interesting that France, home of nuclear, is doing this - probably linked to the extent to which their nuclear plants are offline simultaneously for maintenance and they're having to import power.
Modern panels are about 22-24% efficient. Asphalt is about 0.1 albedo. So if you displace or export electricity. At least 12%.
I can't for the life of me find the albedo of solar panels of various types (people just assume it's zero which is patently untrue because it's much more visible than black paint at 0.05). A completely made up guess would be around 0.05-0.2 (they look lighter than asphalt except for topcon) so my guess would be 17-34% better (or ballpark same as greenery).
One less-obvious benefit to this will be that many spaces will likely be wired for EV chargers at the same time, since they'll be running electrical lines throughout the parking lot anyway. This should help make the switch to EVs much more attractive to many people who can't charge at home.
you can probably come up with a spreadsheet analyzing the costs and returns to figure out exactly where the most profitable point is, taking into account all the other fixed costs you’ll have in the build.
i doubt the cheapest or the most expensive panels are that point.
heavier than a solar panel, increasing all labor and mounting costs, while producing ~zero return. also not as weather proof as a solar panel, so you'll be up replacing them sooner.
The panel is already the cheapest part of the solar system in commercial scale. As little as €30/m^2 for older technologies that are being phased out because BOS makes buying more efficient ones cheaper.
Durable plywood with a finish that doesn't scare customers away is not going to be much less and doesn't make €20 worth of electricity a year.
Also you need calculator panels across 50% of it according to the law.
If you're going to pay €30/m^2 for the support structure, why not add a real panel and some real inverters to pay the whole thing off in 8 years? Plus you'll attract wealthy EV early adopters.
This is either a coincidence, or a very clever and perfectly timed move to provide a perfect market for the development of perovskites (which may wind up cost competitive with shade sails) while they're still too inefficient and unreliable to justify the cost of land, and hasten the transition to tandem cells by a few years.
my family owns a large solar farm. you're the one being absurd here.
paying for all of the work to build a plywood solar farm, and then _never_ _getting_ _anything_ _back_ would've been profoundly negative.
you're thinking about the first day after the install. _sure_ it _might_ cost less to install a bunch of plywood. and then you never get anything for it. and nobody will give you a business loan for "i want to install fake solar panels", but "i want to install actual solar panels" has all sorts of cheap money thrown at it.
over the life of the system installing actual panels has a shot at paying for itself.
Interesting fact, the parking lots at euro Disney produce a large chunk of the electricity needed in the park.
Sad fact, the whole thing belongs to AXPO, a large Swiss state owned company that is supposed to ensure many places in Switzerland have enough electricity but instead invests heavily in foreign green energy...
It makes sense, but why can't they provide economic incentives so people naturally do what's best? Maybe some plan to buy electricity from urban surfaces, which will include car parks? With the current plan, people will throw up crap that enables them to check the box without helping anyone.
Thinking about my own comment, maybe there is something special about parking lots being especially ugly. Maybe they are thinking about this more in terms of beatification zoning than electricity policy.
What already happens with current panels in the snow ? And most of France, especially important population center where 80+ places parking usually are, see few, if any, snowfall in a year. So this is not really an issue.
Apologies - I didn't mean it like that. Obviously dark nights, cloud cover and snow impact generation capacity. I'm thinking structurally, though. Unlike rain or cloud, snow will add a heap of weight to panels. I'm wondering how that impacts their lifespan.
Paris is at 49° N. Any panels will be installed with a sharp slope pointing South. Snow won't sit on a metal at that angle without extra snow catchers, much less on glass panels.
Obviously you design them for expected snow and wind loads, but they're also angled and since they're black as soon as sun gets through to them it'll start melting off.
Our solar collectors could use a recursively-branching fractal form for optimal light-collection. And they could be painted a pleasing shade, maybe green. And they could store the solar energy in a kind of CHON battery, for ez carbon sequestration and upcycling. And we could label our new product something snappy, like "Retarded Fucking Fake Trees".
In short nothing has been decided yet.