The solar covered parking lots near me are great because they also serve as cover for your car when it’s hot and sunny.
It’s not the most cost effective way to install solar, though. A tall structure designed to put the panels high up in the air and leave a lot of space for cars is a lot more expensive than normal rooftop solar or even field setups. This is basically a way to force some of the cost of clean energy as a tax on parking lots. Which may not be a bad thing for dense cities where parking lots have their own externalities on the limited available land.
It's probably less expensive than field setups in large part due to siting near existing infrastructure. And it doesn't have to out compete residential, it just has to be a net positive investment on its own terms, out competing an otherwise unshaded parking lot that isn't leveraging it's airspace for anything.
Rather than a tax on lots it's something that turns them into a source of revenue generation.
I love seeing trees in more places, but for parking lots in particular they do have some downsides compared to solar panels. They often require more space; they attract birds that that poo on vehicles; and there’s a higher risk of collateral damage during windstorms. Not to mention that solar panels directly produce electricity, of course.
We absolutely should see more trees in many cities, but they introduce their own challenges in parking lots, especially if they’re placed retroactively.
I think this is a tree density problem. Most cities have a small number of trees, and they’re almost always over cars. These are trees that line streets and parking lots. Without trees, birds just have telephone poles and wires, which are also over the cars.
In San Francisco, we have a lot of trees on most of our streets, and many parks small and big, all full of trees. This means birds spread themselves out everywhere, not just over cars.
I think the true barrier to getting more trees is that individuals tend not to want to pay for and maintain trees. This includes caring for the tree, trimming it when it gets bigger, and cleaning the pollen, leaves, fruits, and branches that fall.
More trees often means less density which leads to worse cities. There is a place for trees, but 'more is better' is not true, especially around a parking lot which has already dropped the density massively. A parking lot is a city dead zone. Trees next to that will just expand that dead zone. It is like in the US where there are ornamental 'parks' at huge intersections. Nobody goes there. They didn't help. Same with parks around government buildings. SF is a great example of wasted space due to this. Generally, you need to minimize parking areas massively and then pack as much city next to them as possible to make up for the services they robbed. In the places where you actually do have exceptionally dense city then you can think about patches of green strategically placed. Getting a diverse, ecosystem like, city is the right approach but there is no hard and fast rule to get there.
Trees can cause a lot of trouble if you don't give them enough space to grow. "Enough space" depends on the kind of the tree, but it's typically similar to a parking space. You can mandate trees, but then you'll get less parking.
They both are in competition for surface exposed to the sun. The mall’s parking lot near my place used to have trees. When they installed the solar panel shaders last year they cut down all of them.
The solar panels go over the parking spaces, like a kind of a bridge, with supports at the sides. There's a lot of space in between.
If the trees were in the same space as the panels, they'd be in the midddle of the parking space. What you'd have then is not a car park, but just a plain ordinary park.
People always end up petitioning for them to be cutdown because tree litter inevitably falls on cars. The best solution for cars is dense multistory parking.
In South Korea, you usually don't see parking lots the size of several football fields like in the U.S., even around venues that generally attract a lot of cars, even in suburban areas. Instead, there are several stories of parking lots under every large building. Above-ground space is simply too valuable to waste on parking.
Unfortunately, you can't install solar panels underground.
If gasoline engines burned their fuel as efficiently as possible, they would produce three by-products: water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2).
Unfortunately, engines do not run perfectly, and as a result, they also produce three by-products commonly referred to as the "terrible trio" of automotive pollutants. This trio includes the following:
* Carbon monoxide (CO) – An odorless, tasteless, poisonous gas, carbon monoxide can cause a variety of health problems and even death. Many urban areas experience critically high levels of carbon monoxide, especially during the cold winter months when engines take longer to warm up and run cleanly
* Unburned hydrocarbons (HC) – Responsible for causing a variety of respiratory problems, unburned hydrocarbons can also cause crop damage and promote the formation of smog
* Oxides of nitrogen (NOX) – Like unburned hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen cause respiratory problems and promote the formation of smog
The lot is always cheaper, as long as the land is cheap. And in most of the US, even land that isn't all that cheap is often best left as a parking lot, economically: You can easily speculate with a parking lot with minimal investment, as the taxes for the empty lot are often low. See all the midwestern cities whose downtowns are 30-40% surface parking.
There are all kinds of bad externalities caused by seas of asphalt that is unused 95% of the time, but few countries are all that interested in using any mechanism to make the property owner pay for them.
They covered most of the parking lots with solar cells a few years back at nearby Michigan State. The economics weren't there, but as a friend who worked there pointed out they viewed it as research.
It's great that when it snows you don't get nearly as much of the white stuff on your vehicle. But when it snows energy production slows to a crawl. We have a lot of snowy days a third of the year.
I wonder if there’s any situation where running heaters to keep the panels clear ends up with positive electricity generation. If nothing else it would help after the fact.
There's a lot of entirely unsupported statements here that seem to be nothing more than uneducated opinion.
You assume there's still a lot of rooftop space that doesn't already have solar on it. SK has very high population density and long started moving toward "less efficient" installs like balcony solar because most 'easy' rooftops already have solar on them. Remember: the rest of the world is way ahead of the US on this stuff. The UK for example regularly sees nearly 100% renewable powering of their grid plus 'recharging' their pumped hydro and BSS reserves.
You declare that covered parking solar is more expensive than rooftop, with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Rooftop solar involves a great deal of site-specific design work, and a ton of on-site, dangerous labor, and usually has to meet tighter code standards. Rooftop work is some of the most dangerous work one can do; that makes it more expensive labor but also injuries and deaths have a substantial cost to society. And labor has to be more skilled.
Parking lot solar setups can be almost entirely assembled in factories, highly standardized down to just about the ground. That reduces parts, eases supply chains, sales inventory, repairs, etc. Final bolt-together and wiring connections are fast, easy, and don't require skilled labor. "Bolt this stuff together, plug this into this." Used or partially damaged systems and their components can be easily repaired or reused elsewhere.
Parking lot solar encompasses a LOT of panels which is more efficient as fixed costs are spread out more; rooftop solar is generally less-so because it's smaller and as mentioned involves a lot of site-specific work.
You ignore the energy savings from the cars being much cooler and not needing to waste as much energy. Being shaded also means the paint, trim, interior, etc stay in better condition longer.
You ignore that solar on-site coupled with EV chargers on site eliminates a lot of grid transmission losses. In theory a residential complex, employer, retail, or commercial site could set up something like this, pumping most of the energy into the cars parked underneath, and have a fairly small connection to the grid.
Bifacial panels suspended well over the ground can collect a not-insignificant amount of energy from their underside.
Solar panels suspended where they have lots of airflow over and under them run cooler, and produce more electricity.
You don't seem very well informed on the subject and probably shouldn't be commenting so confidently.
> You ignore that solar on-site coupled with EV chargers on site eliminates a lot of grid transmission losses. In theory a residential complex, employer, retail, or commercial site could set up something like this, pumping most of the energy into the cars parked underneath, and have a fairly small connection to the grid.
How many square yards of panels would one EV charger need an a typical afternoon / evening?
A Solar panel produces about 250W peak per square meter. A parking spot can thus produce maybe three kW. A whole parking lot is probably enough for one or two chargers.
They'd also be unhappy with a solar panel that only generated power when a car was plugged in. Fortunately it would still be connected to the grid, resolving both concerns.
Even better if we could somehow trunk my space’s 3500W of panels with the ones covering the combustion-driven car next to me. And the empty space to my other side…
Your car already has the battery built right into it, so a trickle charge for eight hours while you're busy at work might be enough to cover your commute.
2 kW over 8 hours would be enough for 100 km per day.
> You ignore the energy savings from the cars being much cooler and not needing to waste as much energy. Being shaded also means the paint, trim, interior, etc stay in better condition longer
There's good points and then there's "let me add some random stuff on top"
> The solar covered parking lots near me are great because they also serve as cover for your car when it’s hot and sunny.
I would like someone better at maths than I am to work out how much petrol this saves drivers because you're getting into a car that's been parked in the shade and not running the air conditioning so hard.
I bet it's at least detectable, even if it's not much.
In Phoenix, Arizona, there are solar panels over the parking lots at since of the grocery stores. Makes a huge difference in survivability when you get back to the car.
(Without huge infrastructure dedicated to car welfare, Phoenix is uninhabitable.)
It's car optimized because the 110F weather makes it un-walkable in the first place. When I lived in a walkable city, I would prefer to walk 30 minutes than drive. When I lived in Phoenix, I did not want to spend more than 30 seconds outside in the summer.
You can always start small and over decades grow the area. After all that is how cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam became bike friendly, not just a few years, but decades of work.
100F days are fine, cakewalks, even, especially with misters + shade. We had 70+ days of 110°F two years ago, and over 20 days 115°F+. They are not the same. Those days are unbearable nightmare fuel, and worse, they turn into insanely miserable nights where the low temperature rarely dips below 95°. It is absolutely awful, dry or not.
Phoenix as well as other similar places (such as Las Vegas where I live part of the year) have an outsized benefit from installing solar compared to normal places. We basically never have to deal with rain or clouds. Installing solar here is a total no-brainer.
Some more context as someone living in Korea right now, "cheap" cars in Korea are quite rare, especially in Seoul. Having a car is somewhat of a luxury and not needed for daily life. So I think this is trying to move some of the cost of clean energy towards those who can afford it.
Usually the luxury part is not the price of the car, it's the associated costs, especially parking. Coupled to the fact that you don't actually need the car (and it's probably a hassle for day to day life, so you only use it for the rare out of town trips).
That's true in many other places, too, like many European and US coastal cities where car ownership rates aren't nearly as high as many people probably think they are.
I really want America to get on board with this. Getting people to not drive is a nearly impossible task given how slow cities move to change the codes, so if we have to have parking lots, put them to use.
I really want the US to get on board with solar in general. Parking lot solar is a good thing generally, but I don't think it should be mandatory because it's an inefficient use of resources. We don't have any shortage of rural land.
Maybe a more flexible policy could be something like: for every parking spot, you must add 1 kw of solar somewhere on your property (whether that's the parking lot or building roof or whatever is up to you) or add 2 kw of solar somewhere within a 20 miles of the site or add 3kw of solar somewhere in the US.
A lot of companies might find that the last option is the cheapest, and if that's the case we should want and encourage them to do that instead.
Feels a little gameable. I’d sell solar rights to some bit of land that I was already going to profitably adding solar to. It might still result in good incentives though.
If you want America on board, get the people on board. Tell them why it's a good idea to stop driving their car. I'm not saying this to be snarky, but that's what it's going to take.
I'm the perfect client for an electric car (I can charge at home, and 99% of my trips are less than 100km). I want one even.
I still use my old ICE though, because the price of vehicles went through the roof those last years, which means the money I saved to replace it only gets me 60% of a car.
My point is telling or convincing people is not enough. The desired outcome must be oviously practical and cheaper.
The problem is when the environment is already optimized for car use, when everything is massively spread out. Hard to get people to stop using cars when infra for walking is an afterthought.
Stop driving their ICE vehicle. Anti car doesn’t fly in America. People want their big spaces, privacy and most don’t want to live in cooped up apartments and spend the majority of their life within walking and public transport distance.
I’d love to not have a car, but I’ve lived in five us cities - one (nyc) had public transportation that was usable - the rest public transportation was massively less efficient than driving. Until that gets fixed people are driving…
massively less efficient is definitely the word, LA has some residents that swear by our trains, but do they go faster than the 1 hour 5 minute commute in traffic? Nope!
The speed of traffic will always be equal to the speed of public transit. To reduce traffic jams you speed up transit. I do not remember what this always-observed effect is named.
> Under a new decree approved by President Lee Jae-myung during a Cabinet meeting on March 11, mid-to-large-sized public parking lots with 80 or more spaces must install solar power generation
South Korea is going to get a lot of 79-space parking lots.
Any government not interested in playing those kinds of games would then swiftly change the “with 80 or more spaces” wording to “could fit 80 or more spaces.”
It seems inefficient to put solar panels over parking areas as it requires significant amount of structure which costs a lot more than shade it creates is worth. Especially compared to how much less structure is needed on more remote solar farms.
Maybe I'm just using American mindset where there is lots of open land that is good for solar generation? Perhaps not true in Korea?
Building solar panel installations in remote locations still requires linking that back to the main grid, and all the in-between infrastructure needed to transform and transmit that power. Building it in an urban location allows you to tap into the existing grid without much added public investment, similar to how some power grids will purchase power from homeowners as an added incentive for doing a home solar install.
The grid connection is very trivial. Connecting panels to the grid is as simple as adding inverter. For example in many places the panels provide electricity to location itself where they are installed.
Right, they actually have siting advantages over ground mounts for that very reason.
And let's not forget that they are investments, not just stranded costs (it's baffling to see them discussed that way to and down the thread). You get something back for having built them and the barrier to entry is the upfront cost, which is easier to overcome if you're a state spending on infrastructure.
>It seems inefficient to put solar panels over parking areas as it requires significant amount of structure which costs a lot more than shade it creates is worth
If you're putting up structures to shade cars from bright sun anyway then it doesn't take a lot of legislative pressure to enforce "the thing you put up has to be solar panels".
Not familiar with SK, but in principle this parking shade had better be panels works. This is doable within both governmental, social and financial frameworks in countries that get decent sun. Whether SK qualifies as "decent sun"...idk...seems borderline to my unqualified eye
Most people driving around in a big city don't have the luxury of choosing a shaded vs. sunny parking space. So the owner of a parking lot doesn't have any incentive to offer shaded parking... unless said shade generates revenue, which a solar panel does.
In a city the best place to put them first is roof tops. Rooftop solar has minimal structural requirements relative to parking lot canopies.
I think this might be partially an indirect tax on parking lots inside a dense city. It raises the cost of using land for parking, but does so in a way that provides shade and clean energy at the same time.
Ground level solar in a big city doesn't make much sense, they'll be getting a lot of shade- which significantly reduces the power generated. They've made new panels that are better with partial shade, but it's still crazy.
Low rise or high rise, (near) ground level (sub)urban PVs are going to run hotter because of the heat island and disrupted breeze, so panel efficiency and lifespan will take a non-zero hit too
High rises are expensive to build. The reason they are built in the first place is that land is even more expensive, and expensive land militates for parking garages rather than open parking lots.
I'm an American, and it seems like a great use of land to me. This
sort of a policy is particularly sensible in areas where it's hot, and
there are extensive parking lots next to places that are mostly active
during the day.
Instead of just having a heat island, you generate power to run AC in
the associated buildings, and you also get shade for the parked cars.
I recently was at the Vegas airport, and what struck me was the parking lot.
It was the same parking lot I saw many years ago. But this time, instead of feeling sorry for the owners of the cars that were obviously getting cooked up, that whole are was shaded in bajillion solar panels.
It seemed like such an obvious win-win for everyone, I expect it to catch on fairly quickly.
You're not looking at the albedo of the solar panels in isolation though, you're comparing it to asphalt and cars. Typical solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05.
Even if it was just 0 albedo no generation, irradiation on whatever's parked beneath would be cut in half plus rest of (re-)radiation converted into far-ir. This is not unuseful. Just don't mandate this kind of thing in places where parking lots have to be cleaned up with bulldozers in winter.
There's a reason centrally planned economies are abject failures. People are incapable of anticipating all of the cascading effects of a "sensible" policy
This is also a feature of distributed economies; it’s just the communication overhead to make a change centrally means that bad decisions are less easily repaired. AI and electronic data feeds seriously could be tried to fix this. There are good advantages to a centralized economy… the trick is getting the objective function right.
And it’s not like modern capitalism has done a good job of that anyhow.
That seems like a confirmation of the point more than a refutation. The parking lot problem is not a free market phenomenon, it's a result of regulation's unintended side effects.
South Korea is pretty mountainous so yes, available land is much less compared to America where we have square miles upon square miles of open land. South Korea is little less the size of Kentucky.
South Korea has a population density of 507/km² [1]
For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area has a population density of 430/km² [2]
I doubt they have vast tracts of undeveloped land. And while solar panels can replace agricultural land or wooded areas, doing so isn't always a big political win.
South Korea has tons of undeveloped land. Just look at an aerial imagery map. It’s just that it’s quite mountainous and heavily forested. (Not that I think we should tear down the forests for this - surface parking lots are already an inefficient use of space)
A flat parking lot is already a ridiculously inefficient use of resources. Putting solar panels on top directly improves quality of life (through shade) and claws back a bit of that inefficiency.
It seems inefficient to not put solar panels over a parking lot. I'm not sure how shade is a major consideration here or how light weight solar panels are a large expense compared to the cost of space in a city. Parking garages are often net negatives to cities and parking lots are generally major negatives to cities since they drive density down and reduce foot traffic (which reduces economic churn). At least this way the city gets another small use out of that area in the form of some local electricity generation. Density and variety of use are major factors in urban health.
Something like 70% of the Korean peninsula is mountainous, and a lot of the space between mountains is taken up by cities and farms. This puts flat land at a bit of a premium
It doesn’t really matter if there’s land that would theoretically be more ideal if the value of the power generated pays for the infrastructure buildout. The best land for solar panels is the land you can build on now.
Correct. There really isnt “more remote” in Korea because it’s such a small nation geographically speaking. You’re never more than a few hours from the farthest border.
it seems wildly efficient to use the massive amount of dead space we cede to cars. Without cars, parking lots are just massive heat sinks that trap and hold heat. Might as well do something with them to make it a little bit better. It also has the added benefit of creating shade for people in the summer and cover during rain.
Dedicated parking areas are hugely inefficient in the first place from an economic perspective, so this is at least getting some double duty out of them.
It adds utility to an arguably less useful use of space (shut up, I used use two words in a row and twice here), minimizes transmission costs and losses (the power is needed right there in the parking lot or where the people parking there are going to), and doesn't displace other land use (farms or nature).
Maybe some WX nerds on HN can answer, but uh... would this help with reducing convection cells that appear above large parking lots? I can look at radarscope during summer and see them roiding up over really large parking lots in my region. Do solar panels help reduce this 'heat island' effect?
Is that 20% of the solar energy, or 20% of the visible light, or some other spectrum fraction? It's easy to lose track of what part of the spectrum you're discussing.
> The conversion efficiency of a photovoltaic (PV) cell, or solar cell, is the percentage of the solar energy shining on a PV device that is converted into usable electricity
This is surely a good thing. The only thing better than this is to build a tall multi purpose structure on that same land AND THEN put solar panels on top of that structure.
However I am curious about the "NO USE FRANCE" text at the end of this article. Is this a licence issue or something? Would love it if someone with insight would be able to comment!
In terms of the formatting/brevity, Reuters was originally a wire service. They'd cover news in foreign locations and send it by telegraphic wire to local newspapers that would license the content.
Telegraphs charged by the word and didn't have letter case. Cryptic in-band signals like "NO USE FRANCE" are a relic of that time.
Since the link OP posted is to the B2B part of Reuters, I'm assuming they still haven't modernized this system.
It doesn't seem to be about photographing people, other pictures don't feature people and still have the "NO USE FRANCE" tag. It seems like all pictures by Chris Jung have the "NO USE FRANCE" tag.
My best guess is that Chris Jung has some kind of an exclusivity contract for publishing in France. Looking at his website, he publishes in "Paris Match", a French magazine, so it may be related.
One important detail is lost in translation. This law applies to publicly-funded parking lots. Public parking does not mean any parking lot open to the general public in this case.
First thing that came to my mind from title: how much flat parking lots there are in Korea, in the first place?
SK has population density of 530/sqkm(1.4k/sqmi), which is literally 14x over the US(37/sqkm or 96 sqmi). So I think it's likely that a lot of their public parking locations would be already in airport style multi level ordeal, and if so, erecting solar panels can be just the matter of laying out panels on already existing and likely less utilized top floor.
I believe solar carports of that size need to be constructed with steel, and South Korea has a significant steel oversupply issue now, so this provides a way to keep the industry going.
This is a great idea, whether full of cars or empty, a lot of heat is absorbed by the parking lots. Just covering them means the concrete below cannot heat up.
This is the kind of thing that every western ( or “rich”
) government should have mandated years ago.
The best time was years ago, the second best time…
We see the results of initiatives like this in BC, Canada.
About 10 years ago they passed a law that when any government building is getting a renovation of any kind, public EV chargers must be built in the parking lot.
The result is that every single town without exception has EV chargers now. The future is coming, despite some doing their best to slow it down.
> This is the kind of thing that every western ( or “rich” ) government should have mandated years ago.
If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.
Does South Korea do mandated parking minimums like I hear is common here in the US? That would tell whether this is a tax on business property in general, or a tax on driving / personal mobility specifically.
Should we explicitly subsidize the kitchen equipment restaurants need in order to comply with food-safety regulations instead of mandating it? How about the mandatory sinks in the bathrooms of businesses (or even the mandatory toilets) - subsidize those instead of mandating them e.g. through OSHA?
Electric utilities are "natural monopolies" that get to monopolize territory in exchange for being well regulated. It's preferable to having 3, 4, 5 utility poles stuck at the same corner all running wire for competitors. But it means you don't have market conditions driving optimization between competitors.
Moreover electric transmission and distribution gains from limiting solar investment and there's a history of utilities being in tension with solar power and lobbying against it. Solar skips the power lines and utilities need people to need power lines.
Thinking about it from an individual (not business) point of view, the upfront capital won’t be repaid for 10-years or more and does little to change the value of the lot. The lot value is probably most dictated by location and capacity. Solar does nothing to affect location, and may even harm capacity. Parking lot customers might choose a lot of its shaded, but ultimately it’s a captive market due to location.
If I owned the lot, I could take on no-risk (which may be why the lot was purchased to begin with), or take on a 6-figure investment that could bankrupt me if the demand for the lot vanished. (I suppose in that case you’d at least be making money on selling power back to the grid.)
> If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”
> If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.
Or, as happened in actual reality, you tell the owners they have to put it in place. Imagine that - the two weirdly specific things you came up with aren’t actually the only two options. Who would’ve thunk.
Even if no more energy infrastructure is destroyed from the moment of this post, the Iran war will do more to speed this up than decades of science, I think.
South Koreans give their government the authority to do such things because we understand that the government need authority to serve its people well. And if the government misuses its authority, we will revoke our permission.
Many Americans are permanently afraid of their government, and they have no confidence that their fellow citizens will man up and confront the government if necessary, so they'd rather have a permanently weakened government that can't serve its people well but somehow (miraculously) still capable of unleashing misery.
The idea of an 'owner' doing whatever they want on 'their' property is ridiculous. They bought that land with restrictions and an understanding that it was part of a regulatory framework. Should an 'owner' be able to set up an industrial chemical plant in the middle of a city without any regulation? How about an open pit mine? A gun range with no regulation? Should I be able to create a massive speaker system pointed at your house next door to drive you away with no consequences? All actions are actually interactions. Everything someone does on their property has impacts to others. We give 'owners' a lot of leeway but that shouldn't be unlimited. Requiring things like solar on roofs, or gutters on roofs, or restricting roof uses, etc etc are all valid concepts. It can, and should, be debated how far those regulations should go but 'get your government off my land' is never a good argument.
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by highly concentrated power, limited political pluralism, and the suppression of dissent, often enforced by a charismatic leader or elite group
.
A mandate is an authoritative command, order, or authorization to act, typically given by a higher authority, such as voters, a court, or a governing body
.
So in the sense that a mandate is passed by government, and governments are sometimes authoritarian? If your logic is stronger than that you'll need to explain it to me. I'm not saying Asian countries are not authoritarian, I take no stance on that, I just genuinely don't understand how mandates imply authoritarianism.
Your options are basically Somalia. Instead of "authoritarian" governments issuing "mandates" you'll get to deal with warlords that will just kill you, take your land, and do whatever you want with it.