_____kSouth Korea Mandates Solar Panels for Public Parking Lots
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.
A better version for shade and city beautification is to force trees around/within the parking lot.
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.
> they attract birds that that poo on vehicles
The city can simply introduce lizards to manage to bird issue.
Nighttime temps of -10c, I think we've got this locked! If not, send the saja boys after them.
> they attract birds that that poo on vehicles
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.
I wonder if this will make it preferable to build parking structures rather than parking lots.
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.
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.
Because they do things like this (Green belt).
We're comparing cities though. Seoul and Manhattan are comparable because they both have features that prevents sprawl.
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.
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?
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.)
Phoenix is uninhabitable precisely because it's entirely optimized for car life from what I heard? (i.e. massively spread out, no walkability, etc)
I suspect they were mostly referring to it being uninhabitable due to the extreme heat and duration of 100ºF+ days.
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’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.
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.
I wouldn't call it luxury. It's just that people don't find it attractive while living in Seoul. Average joe definitely can afford having a car.
"An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport."
> Having a car is somewhat of a luxury
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.