12 ms·

Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts. My biggest

• csdreamer7 1y ago
  > It's also much nicer for the vehicles parked there to be in the shade. Pedestrians too.
  • hinkley 1y ago
    I love the idea but execution will determine if this is better for pedestrians. Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level. Hopefully this will be the sort of thing where we try different strategies quickly and pick winners and losers. India has done a lot of work with covering irrigation canals with solar, and in some ways that’s a simpler problem so it makes sense that this is happening now instead of earlier. Big successful systems start as small successful ones. Maybe there is some substantial knowledge transfer that can occur there.
    • Arrath 1y ago
      >Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level There's certainly no need for the support superstructure to need more pillars and members than your typical multi deck parking structure and while yes some have bad sightlines a majority are totally fine.
  • Scoundreller 1y ago
    Depends on the season! In winter I'd park my car at a train station and be sure to have the windshield pointed west so the car would be a bit toasty when I got in.
• testing22321 1y ago
  I’d much rather look out across a city and see solar panel islands rather than a coal smoke stack belching smoke, a nuke cooling tower or a massive dam. Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind
  • tomrod 1y ago
    I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.
    • boshomi 1y ago
      Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower. In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV. There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.
      • tbrownaw 1y ago
        This is a prediction of the future, not an observation about the present / past like it's phrased as.
        • hinkley 1y ago
          We are already cresting that hill. It’s happening now. It’s not happening everywhere, but it’s already happening.
        • boshomi 1y ago
          no, this are real world prices https://www.infolink-group.com/spot-price/ https://www.infolink-group.com/spot-price/ https://wind.in-en.com/html/wind-2462559.shtml https://wind.in-en.com/html/wind-2462559.shtml (chinese example) BESS 5MWh 52 USD/kWh: https://www.metal.com/Battery-Cell-And-Module/202407100001 https://www.metal.com/Battery-Cell-And-Module/202407100001 Yes, electricity is becoming very cheap in China, and it will be difficult for the West to keep up here. Exorbitant US tariffs are also counterproductive, as they only serve to secure monopoly profits for old utilities.
• shermantanktop 1y ago
  > solar panels are no less ugly than asphalt. Matter of taste. But I find geometric rows of tilted rectangles much less noisy (visually) than a zillion random cars, or an acre of cracked asphalt.
  • circuit10 1y ago
    I think maybe it was supposed to say “no more”
  • hinkley 1y ago
    Solar operators aren’t cranking the bass so high that the windmills are leaving rust shadows on the road at stop lights. Well, at least not so far.
• hinkley 1y ago
  Some stores build parking for peak traffic days and a few people have suggested that it would be better if the outer bits of your lot were built using permeable pavement to reduce the amount of runoff that has to go onto the storm sewers. The little rain gardens we see now do something but not much.
• Reason077 1y ago
  > ”the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.“ Yes, but if you’re building shade canopies over the parking lot anyway (this is quite common in southern Europe, for example) the marginal cost to add solar to the design will be relatively small. And if the government is backing it, production volumes will rise so it’s no longer a niche product. Economies of scale.
  • hinkley 1y ago
    Solar already has economies of scale. There are three types of projects called out in How Big Projects Get Done and what they all have in common is that what you do on day 25 is mostly refinement of what you were doing on day four. Those are roads, solar, and wind projects. The self similarity means you are more likely to hit your targets. Because you just go faster and faster as you figure out the choreography. And the known unknowns.
• apparent 1y ago
  Will self-driving cars cut down on parking lots? Seems like they'll be much smaller/denser once the car can even just self park (don't have to leave room on left/right for opening doors, and can even stack tighter/front back as long as you're smart about shuffling them). And of course, once more people are using self-driving cars instead of owning their own, cars will have less idle time spent in lots.
• NedF 1y ago
  [dead]
• Scoundreller 1y ago
  No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting. You have to build for more wind loading. For a car to crash into it and not fall over. And now that the public is around, build that much stronger to never fall over. And secure the wiring that much better against the public. Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible. > Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space. I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story. My personal thought is to saturate rooftops before going for the poorer ROI parking lot PV canopies.
  • wakawaka28 1y ago
    >Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible. Yeah, who needs to eat anyway? Lol it is perfectly fine to put this shit in parking lots. In hot climates, it's a benefit to customers to have covered parking. The wiring should be no more fragile than, say, power lines or lighting fixtures in the area. Parking lots are also better because it doesn't matter as much if water leaks between or around the solar panels. Putting them on rooftops tends to cause roof leaks and it presents problems for roof repairs. >I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story. Higher temps around black PVs should be similar to black asphalt. Also, the thermal mass of the PVs is lower, so they will not stay as hot in the evening. There are probably issues with PVs related to ice buildup and hail. They probably don't make sense in places with those issues.
    • Dylan16807 1y ago
      > biodiesel or fuel-ethanol > who needs to eat You, uh, don't eat those.
      • wakawaka28 1y ago
        Fuel ethanol is stupid too. It is made from corn, which could be used to feed people or at least animals. Anyway the point is, there is plenty of land that could have solar panels on it besides farm land. Farm land is too important to waste. We will starve if we don't have enough of it. You should always grow more food than you technically need. Crops can fail, and you can't eat solar panels or credit cards.
• cyberax 1y ago
  > Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space. Wait until you hear about public transit... > Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts. Not really. You don't need anything unusual, just regular flat panels. The main expense is building the canopy itself to conform to all the requirements for hurricane/seismic resistance.
  • jakelazaroff 1y ago
    Subways and buses are vastly more efficient, both in terms of energy cost and rider throughput.
    • cyberax 1y ago
      Nope. A large city might have 1-2% of it's entire population just working on supporting transit. It's _that_ wasteful. Transit also destroys entire lifetimes worth of time every day by forcing people to wait or to suffer through inefficient routes. That's why parking lots are the most beautiful structures in cities.
      • Permik 1y ago
        You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back. It's so much more efficient than everyone having to use their own time to all individually make that effort. I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state. Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI) E: fixed mafs
        • cyberax 1y ago