Ever since I was a kid, I used to wonder why roofs of buildings didn’t include, or where made of, solar panels.
And then turn parkings into essential energy infrastructure? Nah. Buldose the parking, put some houses, and put solar panels on the houses
I wonder why not every single new warehouse, corporate HQ, supermarket, strip mall, shopping mall and commercial building do not have solar panels on their roofs?
The only reason is cheap electric prices for big corps. If they wouldn’t get subsidiaries, i bet you there is solar everywhere. Also a lot of them started doing this in the eu but there are not enough installation professionals to keep up.
A LIDL opened about 6 months ago near my place… zero panels over the car park… and 1 (one) EV charger… like… you’d think they’d had it pegged by now.
@0x0 @Mangoholic Nah, cheapest possible infrastructure is all.
But the investors want to hear you’re making investments that pay out within a year. A decade to see a return means they’ve got no interest.
Solar panels are a classic “it takes money to make money” example. Pretty expensive up front. I feel like that’s the main reason.
You’ve fallen for the myth of corporate efficiency.
1/3 of the warehouses in my area have solar panels.
The main factor to stick with grid power, I assume, is the electricity is cheap enough. Panels take a decade or more to pay back in savings. Many tenants won’t stay that long. Many landlords won’t give a shit with directly billing the tenant. Even as an individual homeowner, 10 years is a long way away.
A second angle that’s a relatively recent thing here is my utility no longer allows you to connect oversized solar systems to the grid. Annual production must match annual consumption. I’m not exactly sure how that plays out on the corporate level, as my experience is individual. Even though it gets hot here, many warehouses are not air conditioned. Without AC, energy consumption for a warehouse is way below the available solar space. So, many warehouses are only half or 1/3 covered, of those 1/3 or less warehouses that have any solar at all. Nobody wants to sublet their roof to the electric company, so the space remains unused.
Meanwhile, I’d expect mall and especially office consumption to exceed rooftop production capability, so solar is only worth the little green leaf stick you can put on the front door saying “we went solar!”. Somewhat similarly to not wanting to rent space to the utility on a warehouse, these places would need to be incentivised beyond net-zero cost to do some social benefitting on their property.
The utility company says they’re going green, but in reality, they’re taking credit for private home solar installations. The kwh price keeps going up. They keep telling me switching to LEDs and unplugging chargers will make it better.
Panels take a decade or more to pay back in savings.
In bulk, maybe. Still… more off-grid autonomy, less grid stressing…
As an individual, sure. That’s something relatively manageable. With solar and batteries, it’s easy to keep your essentials powered. But that’s not what the commenter asked. They asked why commercial spaces don’t adopt solar so readily. They’re not in the market to go off grid. It’s not a real selling point. If the power goes out, the warehouses often still run tasks and office workers can generally be sent home. Shoppers will have to wait it out. It’s such a rarity, just about no business, at least not here, loses any significant money in power failures because they’re so rare as it is.
counterpoint - get rid of car parks and cars
Why not both?
Panels on grazing areas and some fields has repeatedly been proven beneficial
But it makes the beautiful parking lots ugly.
Imagine a parking lot but with shade in the summer and out the rain
Can we stop this shit
@Viking_Hippie actually agrivoltaics work pretty well and help farming :)
Some combos are beneficial for the plants bellow. Either way, any solar plant is better than coal.
Except that agrivoltaics works out being better for the crops and the panels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
The crops part is similar to why grass grows better under trampolines. https://youtu.be/CoDn-1rGcpk
You wouldn’t want many carparks in the first place.
True, but if we’re not getting rid of them, let’s at least make them useful
I totally agree and I’ve been saying this for a little while. But get this, since there are plenty of unused grassy properties out there in America, there’s somewhere they’re making deals with sheep heard owners where the sheep are regularly brought over to the property to eat grass around and under the solar panels. Apparently trying to keep the grass cleaned up and not overgrowing the panels is a problem because of all the little nooks and crannies, getting mowing done under and around them as a pain in the ass. But the sheep can just come in there get a free meal and do the job perfectly well. It’s win-win.
sheep wouldnt exist without humanity. its also -like all other bred animal races with similar situations- serious damage for their bones to carry 10kg’s of extra fur(bred to be wooly).
So no, this is not a win-win
even for non-vegan people the climate impact of sheep farming should be concerning.
Not a win because it’s not vegan? Most people don’t share your beliefs.
Most people are happy to use the animals we have spent thousands of years making useful
I see this as a win/win/win - the sheep farmer gets rent for the land the panels are on, the weeds are kept down by the sheep, we get clean electricity, we get wool
Ed. “Animal races” the word is species, races is for the variation in humans, or in fantasy it’s the humanoid species
I suppose it would be reasonable to talk about races of sheep to talk about all the different types of sheep
Breeds. When is animals they’re different breeds. Interestingly there’s fewer differences between human ethnicities than between different animal breeds
Among humans I have heard that there is more variety within human races than between them
Music says we’re the whole human race
Goarts then, whatever. You can hang out with goats even if youre not exploiting them more than you would a human.
“No profit, not work-ey” - unless we change the system to make accumulation impossible of course
anything else would be ignorant to compare to the commonness of parking lots - as in not worth to compare to begin with, like the handful of animal sanctuaries or whatever u’d think of here
Maybe we live in a society that just has more goats, and goats are a bigger part of everyones lives.
Id rather not have any parking lots if it were entirely my choice.
look, im car free by choice - couldve owned a newer A4 avant. So we agree on the parking lots in its prevalance are too much.
This doesnt change the fact that the whole sheep input is still absurd - no matter how romanticized the cartoony picture looks like… the realist view on your idealist idea could be “agrar solar” -> here an example picture
There is a big ass vehicle turning the soil in that pic. I dont think thats a phase of modern agriculture typically presented in the pr photos, and its not pretty even when you do it by hand.
i dont follow, maybe its because im not native english/american? id be happy if you could make the point clearer for me here…cause currently youre discribing the thing but there seems to be no full argument without further context?
Here in the West they’re just covering up all the desert areas that are not being used anyways. And they also bring in livestock of various kinds to take care of a lot of the weeds and keep it cleaned up as well. I think it’s a great use of space since there is so much of it in such wide abundance of sun. There’s also quite a few of the car parks here that have been installing solar panels over the cars and that’s a great use as well but that’s also quite a huge expense overall.
Desert areas can still have rich ecosystems that get severely affected by solar farms.
Someone said to me yesterday, why don’t we redirect the Ord River (WAus) down to Kalgoorlie (also WA) and irrigate and farm the desert. Some real-life Fremen mind at work there. My eyes rolled so hard, the “its desert, nothing lives there”, is strong with that one.
Carport solar is a terrible idea.
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Increased height for structure, likely increased weight as well since you need to make super-duper sure they don’t pancake somebody’s car. This leads to;
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MUCH greater chance of property damage and resulting payouts (not to mention the risk of somebody’s Timmy managing to shock themselves)
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Harder to build and maintain due to number 1, as well as having a bunch of cars around, needing to schedule lot closures, etc.
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Number 3 gets in the way of actually using the parking lot as a parking lot, which is probably going to be pretty unpopular with the property owner and/or lose them money from decreased business.
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Oh yah, harder to angle due to the constraints you’re under, so less efficient.
All this adds up to making it a lot more expensive than just putting them on the ground. We have TONS of abandoned malls and supermarkets all over the country, just use that smh.
i remember when i was five on the top floor of a parking garage i touched the solar roof on my great-great granpappy’s fisker karma and got a nasty shock. Shocked the gay right out of me. But then i touched some exposed wiring on one of the tall lampposts and that turned me Bi so who’s laughin now gramps
coincidentally, the lamppost then also fell into his car, and he renounced his commitment to the environment and bought a Hummer h2 with his fat insurance payout
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It’s either a roof structure by itself or adds another ~3cm of height to an existing roof.
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You vastly overestimate the weight of solar panels. The ones shown probably weigh ~20kg, and probably ~35kg with framing etc. Most car roofs are rated to 30-150kg of dynamic weight. In the statistically highly improbable event where the structure completely collapsed it certainly will not “pancake” anything and will likely just be cosmetic damage.
“somebody’s Timmy managing to shock themselves”
No more dangerous than any of the wires that are, probably, within a few meters of you as you read this.
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“Harder to build and maintain” sure, but not by much and nothing requiring the full lot closures you’re imagining.
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“harder to angle” Sort of, there might be instances where a suboptimal angle results in better aesthetics, cheaper materials, snow clearing, etc. but we’re talking ~10-15% efficiency loss.
Based on the shoddy logic and non-existent research I’m guessing this isn’t really about the solar panels. You wanna share what the deeper concern/peeve is?
My concern is people advocating for expensive and ineffectual strategies because it looks cool in a social media post instead of doing things that are actually useful. We have an insane amount of land to use. Do public transit, do utility-scale solar. Don’t do this nonsense.
Oof, I 100% feel you there. That is a huge problem and those 2 suggestions are critical things that need to be done more of. I’m 100% with you that pretending like these dinky little instillations are at the scale of what is needed is ridiculous.
However. I do think your overall frustration is coloring your perception of this solution a bit. I think you would be shocked at the efficiency possible from a distributed solar network like this.
Yes, a centralized utility scale solar in the “insane amount of usable land” is more efficient both resource-wise due to economies of scale and in generation due to things like sun-tracking. However, it has significantly more transmission losses and labor upkeep.
A distributed solar network’s goal is to reduce those transmission losses by having the generation at point of load and increase local independence/resiliency at the cost of some resource and generation efficiency. It is solving a slightly different problem and so has different weighting on the cost/benefit analysis.
Understanding more where you’re coming from; I get it. But projecting that frustration onto decent solutions to different problems in such a factually incorrect way is not helping.
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What insanity is this, have you ever been in a parking garage where most are like 8ft ceilings. Most solar car parks are well over 12ft and no issue with building them. Yeah it’s more expensive to build solar car ports vs ground based but you don’t need to build big transmission lines which delay or prevent many large solar fields. Then hopefully you can have EV charging stations right there power cars off the sun.
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Why not both?
In the UK we’re getting a lot of large solar projects approved on farmland, and locals are predictably upset.
But at the same time those people didn’t actually support farmers and buy their stuff at a price that meant they would be better off growing crops rather than covering fields in panels.
And 90% of the complaining is oil industry shills, as per usual.
I don’t think it is intentional on OP’s part, but this is really well-disguised fossil fuel propaganda. Carport solar is way more expensive than ground-mounted, and it isn’t viable for utility-scale projects. Should we do carport solar? Absolutely! But we also really need utility scale solar.
And if you put it on marginal farm land and make the ground cover pollinator-friendly, it actually improves yields on nearby farms without any real loss, since that land wasn’t great for growing food anyway. (Not to mention that cropland is about the furthest thing from a natural ecosystem)
Why would it be way more expensive? Sure, you’ll have to put it on poles, but…
The infrastructure to build a load-bearing roof over a parking lot is significantly more than the concrete footings and supports needed to hold ground-based solar. There are some public lots near me that have solar roofs over them. When I park there I almost feel like I’m pulling into an underground parking garage.
But solar panels wouldn’t add a significant load. Pretty much any standard metal carport roof could support them.
I’m not an expert by any means, but every commercial carport I’ve seen over public parking lots has included steel beam construction mounted on reinforced concrete footings that extend 2+ feet above ground. The concrete footings appear to be designed not only to support the structure but to be able to absorb the impact of cars that might otherwise dent/bend the steel supports. A few examples:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fcQ9PUoWp68c21n57
https://maps.app.goo.gl/QqbmVsphByzN5Xi56
https://maps.app.goo.gl/n3wUKkYZLMCpzVTz5
The electrical infrastructure to support these is also significantly more than a residential solar setup. I have 44 panels on my roof, and I counted around 488 on one of these carports. I can generate around 85 kWh on a clear day, so one of these can probably generated 1000 kWh or more. You’ll need good electrical infrastructure to safely manage that and feed it into the grid.
Right, but there shouldn’t be any additional structural requirements to build a carport with solar panels vs one without. The steel beam construction is more than sufficient. Any electrical infrastructure, apart from wires to the panels, doesn’t need to be on the roof.
The count of panels on a wood frame house vs steel structure really isn’t something you can compare.
Not to mention… Much lower chance of some idiot ramming their car into the structure if it is out on a field somewhere.
The actual panels are no longer the most expensive part of an install.
And if you put it on marginal farm land
I like to casually browse land (you know, to build a little community for me and my friends when I win the lottery) and I see this everywhere. A lot of farms by me have solar panels along the road, often quite a lot of them. I’d imagine a lot of crops don’t do well next to a highway.
Many of the listings point out that the existing contract with the utility company pays more than the property taxes
But we also really need utility scale solar.
If you put them on most viable mad-made surfaces… do we really?
You can place ground based solar farms just outside cities where they have access to main power lines that can carry megawatts; inside the city they probably can only push kilowatts per phase.
30kW is the limit for commercial (or any 3 phase) solar generators in my town, that is cheaper to mount on the building roof
The solar farm nearest me, right near the high voltage wires that supply that side of the city, has 13MW of panels, three orders of magnitude more
Also in the US we grow massive amounts of corn to be processed into ethanol for gasoline, less than 5% of that land converted to solar would make the same amount of energy that all the ethanol from the corn produces. And if slightly less than half the land used for corn for ethanol was used for solar, the US would be at net zero carbon production.
And it’s not like ethanol is some byproduct that still allows that corn to be used for food or something else. Nope, we’re wasting all that land exclusively to burn up in our cars.
It’s crazy because ethenol COULD be just a byproduct from food production. Talking to farmers about a decade ago that what they were aiming for. Basically a step before just tilling it or burning it back into the field if it was misshappen (consumers don’t buy ugly veggies) or worse infested/rotting.
The subsidy structure messed that up apparently. The subsidized crop insurance made it not worth it, plus the ethanol subsidies required dedicated fields.
I 100% would rather see solar over dedicated ethanol fields and all of the water usage and pollution they represent.
I think it’s unreasonable to say it’s fossil fuel propaganda. I like having shade and coverage in a car parking lot.
It’s not that the solar covering is just for solar power, but it’s a convenient pitch to combine the use cases where sure, solar covering parking is more expensive than solar straight on the ground, and sure, a plain covering is cheaper than a solar covering, but right now the lots are uncovered bits of asphalt that could be better.
Oh, to be clear, I don’t think carport solar arrays are fossil fuel propaganda. They’re a useful application where they fit. It’s the idea that solar on fields is harmful that I object to, and I worry that carport solar is being presented without the full context as a red herring, so folks like us who want more solar start objecting to utility-scale ground mount.
Saying it’s unreasonable is too far, fair to disagree with it though… Fossil fuel is always happy to push clean energy projects that wouldn’t work well at scale to sabotage things. Though personally I’d say calling this out as car propoganda is more important…
This is propaganda. It is intended to make you think worse of ground mounted solar, the carpark side is to make the message palatable, but isn’t comparable. But solar farms in fields is the cheapest way of deploying massive solar plants
Carpark solar is limited to the power infrastructure at the carpark, the limit for commerical building solar in my town is 30kW, the solar farm nearest me (on a sheep field) is 13MW
Commercial buildings get to choose: solar on the roof or solar over the cars. Putting it over the cars will more than double the cost.
So this is, or acts as, propoganda, saying “this effective thing is bad, instead we should do this impossible thing”
Honestly, nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar. Solar is great, but it’s not perfect. It requires a lot of lithium for batteries, and producing the panels puts carbon in the atmosphere.
nuclear does better for utilities level power than solar.
Define “better.” Personally, I think nuclear is too expensive to be a current solution. Let all the existing nuclear plants continue out their useful lives, and extend them as feasible, but constructing new nuclear plants is probably not worth the cost, even compared to solar + enough grid scale storage to cover multiple nights of demand even when days are cloudy.
Terrapower just got approval to build their $4 billion, 345-MW reactor. That’s $11.6 million per MW.
NuScale canceled their 462 MW project in Utah when it became clear that the total cost was going to exceed $9 billion. That’s $19.5 million per MW.
Solar plants are about $1 million per MW. Grid scale 4-hour batteries are about $750,000 per MW.
And the costs of solar/batteries keep dropping, while nuclear tends to increase in cost over time.
And the solar doesn’t need nuclear industry staff, and doesn’t need nuclear industry certified parts, and doesn’t produce radioactive waste
Solar doesn’t need to refuelled
Solar needs active maintenance, including personnel of varying skills. All projects have ongoing costs, especially if they’re gonna sit outside in the weather.
Better to just compare all costs, across the projected lifespan, and compare replacement costs if one source lasts longer than the other.
Doing all that tends to show that building new nuclear isn’t cost competitive. Not big reactors, not small reactors.
My point is you don’t need people with doctorate level education to run a solar plant, you occasionally need people with a technical level education to fix stuff, or near unskilled to clean
And if you need parts they don’t come with the x hundred percent markup for certification that nuclear has
Nuclear is good for baseload, and although it is very clean, it isn’t quite carbon-free either. It’s also very expensive, unpopular, and has a lot of regulations. I agree it’s good and necessary, but solar and batteries are way cheaper and can go almost anywhere, so they’re way easier to deploy. With the pace of climate action we need, I don’t think it’s an either-or, we gotta do both, fast.
Thorium makes sense for supplying metropolises and 24/7 heavy industry between sunset and midnight. Uranium doesn’t make sense because it’s rare and hard to mine. Daytime nuclear doesn’t make sense because solar is cleaner, cheaper, and decentralized. And it doesn’t make sense for smaller cities, towns, and rural areas because you need to waste a shit-ton of electricity transporting the power of one reactor long distances.
It’s easy to forget how wasteful it is to lose 90% of your electricity transporting it long distances when that is what all the 20th century infrastructure was built around. But there are tons of energy storage methods that don’t require lithium that are more efficient, provided the electricity is generated locally.
many also put them on pasture land, the grass grows just fine under it, and the animals get some shade to hang out in
Large herbivores like cows are going to be capable of damaging traditional solar installations. But this would be great for goats and sheep and stuff.
Chickens would be fine, but you’d have to clip their wings (not surgically) so they can’t fly up on them.
or have some kind of replaceable film for removing the shit easy
I’m not too up to date on solar panel materials engineering, but another concern would be them pecking at the panels or their claws scratching/cracking the existing cover.
Cattle pastures usually just mount the panels higher up, and put safety cages around service panels and electrical conduit.
The most I’ve seen with chickens is just a couple panels on the roof of the coop, or barn for industrial sized chicken processing. (I’m not going to call it farming, it’s basically a factory)
I have always been puzzled about why raising chicks is farming instead of ranching.
But I was meaning damage to the supports if the livestock was allowed close enough to benefit from the shade. Although the risk with chickens is getting the panels dirty or damaging them.
Only problem is many pasture animals are not compatible with agrovoltaics. Cows tends to rub on the supports and may chew any exposed wires, goats will find their way on top of the panels no matter what you do, pigs will chew on any exposed wire or insulation, and sheep, well they’re actually okay for agrovoltaics.
There’s the alternate approach of basically using solar panels as fences which might work better for some pastures. Ultimately agrovoltaics is one of those combinations of factors that is going to take time and experimentation to perfect
Any time I’ve seen PV panels in a pasture field, they’re all set up a little differently depending on the field, animals, etc.
The ones with cattle look closer to the ones in the parking lot in the post photo, they’re way up on a post, all the wiring is either kept up high or are in a metal conduit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them with goats though. Goats are assholes.
