_____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.
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.