Dont cover our car parks. Cover our public transit stations…oh wait. There are none. (USA)
Can we stop this shit
or both! ill wear a solar panel on my head if it helps adoption
You:
counterpoint - get rid of car parks and cars
Ever since I was a kid, I used to wonder why roofs of buildings didn’t include, or where made of, solar panels.
I have explanation, but you will not like it.
Parking lots have been built on cheap. Those who have roofs can’t support any added weight, while those who do not have roofs are far away from any serious electrical connection able to give the energy outside.
The whole idea can be done… on new parking lots.
Also - how about instead we build more water-plant power storage? They pump water to the upper reservoir using electricity in the middle of day, and then produce electricity from flowing water at dawn/dusk/night. This would up the demand for electricity when solar panels are overproducing it and push businesses to consider including solar panels in their constructions.
The benefit of pavement being cheap is it’s not terribly expensive to remove or repair bits of it. Cut a square out, drill down with an auger, chuck a sonotube in and pour a footing. Trenching in conduit for power lines doesn’t seem like much of a deal breaker either.
I’d also image a parking lot is closer to an electrical connection than a farm field out in the country.
Okay, I give on the first part, but not on the second.
Farms consume quite a lot of electricity actually, and often electrical grid must be enforced more for a farm than for a suburbs.
not near electrical infra
Unlike the average field
Ones on roofs are easy, a panel can’t weigh more than a car so you lose a few parking spaces on the roof level and bob’s your uncle. The goal is to reduce car usage so it’s fine. And existing ones are too far away to provide electricity? What? They’re literally beside stores which consume power! Yea I don’t like that answer, it’s dumb as hell.
The pumping idea sounds cool, though, and I’m not against it, but dude I’m so tired of “what if we do nothing because we can’t understand the concept of having multiple solutions going at once?”
Pumped storage can only be feasibly used on existing suitable terrain, and we used most of the easy location.
There is not much left, and with cheap battery storage and power to gas you can go way cheaper. Hydro power and storage is not the future.
Why not both?
From the agricultural perspective- we’ve got billions to feed and that isn’t going to go away. Better ways to use the land we’ve turned into fields is a different subject, but between plant’s need for solar and how they’re harvested it’s a no go. Wind capture is an option though.
For what’s left of our wild spaces- we’ve already fucked so many. Solar may be a lower impact on what remains but there’s millions of acres that have already been converted for our “needs”. We should focus on generating our power in the areas already developed before talking about dropping more manmade structures in the wild.
It’s often mutually beneficial for animals to graze around solar panels. Having them in fields is not inherently wasting the space.
Animal agriculture, excepting very small symbiotic regenerative practices youve never fucking heard of, ends in any future where we still have humans in a century.
This is not a moral imperative. The future where thats viable is underwater and boiled to a grey lump.
That’s why I referenced plants, not animals. Also, don’t fool yourself. The bulk of your meat is not grazing in a field even if the packaging label makes it look that way. It’s knee deep in shit-mud and shoulder to shoulder with it’s kin in a CAFO or tearing up the native vegetation on the public lands out west.
There are also studies showing certain plants do well too. Also ignoring that a truly massive amount of cropland is being used for ethanol, which is a much less efficient form of energy than solar.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
even for non-vegan people the climate impact of sheep farming should be concerning.
Very often the fields that those solar panels are covering are land fills or polluted sites that would be unsuitable for any kind of building or agriculture due to contamination. Utility grade solar often seeks out land that is already disturbed and unsuitable for other purposes because it’s cheap.
Covering parking lots with solar panels doesn’t make them any less horrible, we should all be aiming towards as little wasted space as possible. Which means no parking lots.
Solar has gotten so cheap to install that solar and wind contractors have been going around the farms around where I live and using high pressure sales and political tactics to buy up good farm land that’s been farmed for generations by small family farmers to instead setup solar panels. It’s been interesting watching the fight and reactions from the sidelines because there’s misinformation being thrown around by both the pro- and anti- solar factions (much more by the anti-solar faction of course) but there’s no avoiding that they bought out 2 family farms to do a particular solar project near me, so that’s two fewer small farms that will probably never return to growing crops
If you’re in the US it would be worth talking to your town and town’s planning board then. It would be up to the town planning board whether or not that was an acceptable use of that specific land in that specific area. A developer would only buy that land if they knew they would get a build permit. You can attend a meeting and there’s usually a time slot for a public input session on the agenda and you can bring that up. If you’re not in the US I’m not sure how it works but it might be similar.
These are all farms outside of city limits of course, that way the energy companies can avoid the most local layer of government and just interact with the county/state level.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about these projects. On one hand I don’t want to see fewer small farms, on the other I’m happy to see more solar and wind energy come online, plus if they’re looking at setting up solar/wind at the scale of acres upon acres of solar, their only options are either to take up existing farm land (which lets be real, only about 5% of is producing food that we eat) or to mow down all of the trees and natural growth on undeveloped land that folks keep for hunting, thereby taking away space from wildlife
I’m a farmer, rancher, and dairyman. This shit pisses me off. You can get dual use out of land. I can grow crops and graze cattle around and often under solar panels. The limiting factor is what the power company will allow me to sell to them. And they don’t want that because bottom lines.
Seriously. The oil industry has been extracting petrochemicals from the earth while we utilize the land above for animals and crops for over a hundred years. Its not difficult. Saying that renewables are using up our land and not allowing dual utilization for other commodities is a lazy and piss poor lie that will not stop and I’m tired of it.
Stop this nonsense bullshit petro propaganda now. Alternative energy can and already does coexist with modern land management and modern farming practices. Full stop.
Farming under the panels can be beneficial in drought conditions.
Putting solar panels above parking lots is still an excellent idea.
It’s the top photo AI? You aren’t supposed to put panels on flammable material like that.
Which here is the flammable material?
Dried grass.
The grass won’t go dry under these panels if mowed regularly
Mowed regularly beneath the shallow panels themselves?
You won’t believe what I’m about to show you
spoiler
I actually cannot believe it, they are so small! How the hell do they store cut grass?
I’d assume they’re mulching mowers.
Since the labor cost to run them is minimal, they can be run daily and produce tiny clippings that remain on the turf as mulch.
Why not both?
Panels on grazing areas and some fields has repeatedly been proven beneficial
Our fields are growing corn to burn as biofuel which delivers much less energy than a solar panel
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.
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.
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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Apparently, covering ~12% of the Australian Outback with solar panels would generate enough electricity to meet 100% of global energy (electricity, heating, transport) needs?!
If that’s true, the problem would be storing and transporting it. Sending electricity via wires is massively inefficient and limited in range.
I didn’t propose it as a viable solution, but more-so as a thought experiment or proof of concept.
A proper implementation would be pretty decentralised to minimise transmission loss where possible, and complemented with whatever analogue energy storage system makes sense locally (hydro dams/kinetic/molten salt/lithium/sodium batteries etc.).
Solar is also not always the solution for colder climates, but in those places we can opt for geothermal or wind sources where feasible, otherwise transmit surplus energy from warmer climates as an absolute last resort.
Oh yeah, for sure. I’m all for more solar. I just hope the scientists continue their research and figure out a way to make the panels without quite so much lead. Or at least make sure the lead can’t leech back into the environment.
Funnily enough, I just recently saw a video about Perovskite solar panels: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w2r9_0NxTW8
First time learning about them, but they do seemingly like a great solution once they come into maturity over the next decade. At that point, we could be at only needing ~6% of the Outback to power the world!
THAT is how we should do world domination. Want to take over the world? Provide sustainable infrastructure and renewable resources.
