Just kind of makes sense no?

This picture/render looks like it's in Europe, where that could maybe be feasible. In the US, though, I think we need to take what we can get.

Parking lots ain't going anywhere.

Ok but like why wouldn't a solar farm be an acceptable alternative?

PV coverings also trap some ambient heat and regulate the surface temperature better than full exposure, acting like a greenhouse that encourages plant growth.

Folks so set on zero sum systems that they ignore synergies.

This post was maybe referring to agrovoltaics?

The largest instillations in the US are in the middle of the fucking desert.

Still this is obviously worse right? We're taking untouched wilderness and turning it into a wasteland of blue silica. Deserts are pretty unique biomes with their own set of diverse animal and plant wildlife.

Farm land is already void of most biodiversity and usually used to grow corn or some other form of unnecessary cattle feed - yeah ideally both get rewilded - but it feels better to reuse an already existing bio wasteland instead of creating new ones..

Not much desert around me. Good farmland is getting leveled and solar put on top when there are parking lots already flat they could do it on. It's just much, much easier to work with fresh ground. It's why old warehouses are left to rot and farmland right next to them are razed for new warehouses.

I put some solar on my farm, but made sure to use a plot that isn't suitable for farming.

In Germany they sometimes put solar on the south side of historic trash hills. Seems like a good idea I can't think of downsides.

You haven't seen much of the US from ground level have you. There are more and more panel farms being built on good farm land. Sizes ranging from 10 to 40 acres at a time from all the ones I've seen.

It might seem small to you, but it does add up.

People generally aren’t building solar panels on farmland anyways?

At least here in Germany they do

I've done a ton of biking in my area over the last 15 years, and it's been depressing seeing how much former farmland and unused wild area is getting gobbled up by the fucking McMansions and "high 700s" McTownhouses. The townhouses are especially sad - like, you're out in the middle of fucking nowhere (no town in sight) and yet you're jammed in with neighbors on both walls?

47 percent of the country is unoccupied.

"we don't want solar panels on farmland" is just a conservative talking point. It's not actually a problem, but it's something that resonates with their boomer voter base.

Yess, vancouverite here also. How do we get our municipalities to do projects like this? There's so much space that would be perfect real estate for solar canopies

And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn't suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

As I understand it, the biggest struggle with such panels is that it prevents heavy machinery from working the crop

Yes.

Land use doesn't determine baseline soil quality, but soil quality often determines land use.

Likely it was used on parts of them that are actually agricultural, then the fossil fuel industry paid good money to call every hill a prime agricultural land.

Is your nation truly food secure if you are relying on imports? Can you be certain that in 20, 50, 100 years that land would still be better as solar panels than farmlands?

In theory a great idea. In reality you get very little space to farm on. Imagine how you drive though the solar panels with an harvester which is as big as 6 rows are wide?

I mean you can shrink down the farming equipment, but farmers make more money not plastering their fields with solar.

If they use solar then they go full south orientation panels because then you don't need to deal with anything on that field anymore.

Also after you install solar panels on a field with heavy equipment the soil is pressed and you will have a few years until you get the soil quality back up.

Yeah, when it comes time to do tillage, that's WILL constrain the directions you can till the ground. Generally, you really want to till at an angle to the direction of planting to break soil compaction better. And to get the proper trash mix into the soil to prevent erosion.

Not a good idea.........

Agrivoltaics are so cool!

Indoor farming is on the rise, as you can have the optimal climate anywhere. It's more spatially efficient with vertical planting, but it has a far higher energy cost for air conditioning and potentially lighting. At least the farm workers are cooler too 🤷‍♀️

If you put solar panels above your crops, that makes them significantly harder to harvest

You could put solar on both?

The first two "cons" seem like non issues, and could be used for any structure ever.

you must prevent parts falling down

So like any ceiling with HVAC, etc? I was thinking that the coverings were a boon to pedestrians due to the shade they provide on hot days (depends on location, of course)

You have to engineer the supports to prevent collapse even if a car drives into them

Cars are protected from hail and heat (good for car factories!)

What? Car companies would love for your car to get damaged. That way, they can sell you replacement parts.

Also helps the guy wrangling carts, those things get hot in the sun

Solar panels are made of a lot of rare metals

Rare Earth Metals aren't actually that rare, although they do tend to be concentrated in countries outside our traditional western sphere of influence. We're seeing a lot of political wrangling in South America and Central Africa, precisely because countries like Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have an outsized stock of these minerals. In fact, a big part of the conflict in Rwanda along their border with the Congo stems from illegal mining and black market export of minerals, and the subsequent criminal cartelization that's sprung up around this traffic.

there’s a lot of variables that have to be considered on each individual level

If you're talking about a globally coordinated geo-engineering project to maximize solar electricity production, then yes - building a big band of solar plants inside the Tropics zone would yield the biggest band for buck. But then moving that electricity out again becomes a challenge, particularly if you're trying to get it to mega-cities like NYC or Tokyo or London or Beijing.

If you're just trying to generate local green power in Ohio, without running massive HVDC lines all the way down to the Yucatan Peninsula, then covering the Browns Stadium or the JACK Cleveland Casino in solar panels is as good a use of solar infrastructure as anything.

Solar panels don't use any "rare metals." Solar carport projects simply cost 3-4x more on a per watt basis than large "green field" ground mount projects. This is due to the increased structural, permitting, and install costs. Carports also cannot track the sun, which reduces their output by about 20%.

Nah, just give like Walmart and Target and other stores that have large parking lots a tax break or something.

This image (ignoring the fact that it's not a real photo) seems to be based in the UK/ England from the car number plate designs. (though the background houses and the cloudless sky were plainly photoshopped from somewhere else )

I think UK has approx 0.1% of agricultural land already given to solar (but I don't know the land classification breakdown).

It is just enough to be noticeable traveling around you do see the occasional normal looking fields with panels all over them.

I've not seen them on the hilly low grade sheep pasture either I guess it might be areas prone to flooding , I'm not sure. It looks like this trade association is looking to expand this to c0.6%. https://solarenergyuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FactSheet-Solar-Farms-and-Agricultural-Land-2024.pdf

UK is not self sufficient on food, so I think it's a poor idea to use UK farmland for this stuff before using up rooftops and car parks and stuff like that for solar PV.

USA is obviously a different situation with way more land - better food security - and in some places more things like deserts to put large scale panels in. But either way brownfield or parking lots seems like a good think to think about - and it can be closer to demand so may reduce transmission and distribution losses and infra costs. I guess most of the farmland in UK ones are probably near existing power lines to keep the grid connection cost down.

Yeah, you know those Walmart hi rises popping up everywhere

Whatever we build, it'll have a top! And on top should be either something green or solar panels.

Parking lots, warehouses, malls, walmarts (and similar superstores), even stretches of in-city highways. There's millions of acres of viable space for solar panels, just no financial incentive to install and maintain it.

USA has vast, seas of parking lots. makes 1000% sense to have them here.

I think you're kind of missing the point, having solar panels in parking lots would add use to otherwise useless land. There's plenty of them in the US and it would also create a relief from the concrete hotspots that it makes. I mean have you ever been walking through a parking lot and hating your life because you're sweating so much?

The problem is a simple paved lot can be redeveloped into something useful easily. Once there are EV chargers and and solar roofs in place, it's that much harder to break the cycle of car dependency. Places like Walmart/Costco/strip malls are probably better off just placing panels on the roof instead of building a new structure for them. I'd actually extend that to just about any building. This isn't really happening at any scale on its own, which tells us it's less economical than other installations. Forcing higher cost installations while also entrenching parking lots that often shouldn't exist seems like poor policy, although I'm sure there are some places where it makes enough sense. But if we care about preserving farmland and wild spaces, stopping sprawl is the only real policy that matters, and that means stopping car dependency and parking lots.

I'm not sure photovoltaics would generate enough juice to recharge a vehicle during 30-60 minute shopping trip. Certainly not on the current iteration of electric vehicle charging capacity.

This is a good use of space and a potentially beneficial way to generate power for the storefront (AC and refrigeration during peak hours are real electricity hogs and would tie out with available sunlight), but idk how effective it would be at recharging vehicles. Not unless the space also has large reserve batteries that can discharge rapidly, and the solar cells were exceptionally efficient at generating wattage.

This is, incidentally, why wind plants get you more bang for your buck than solar plants. The supermassive turbines out along the Corpus Christi coastline can generate north of 3 MW/h. Meanwhile, you'd need 75,000 sqft of 200-watt 5' panels to generate an equivalent. Electric car batteries hold somewhere between 40-100 kWh of power. So getting the math to work is a bit tricky.

Why would you need to dedicate the output to a specific goal? We already have a good target for all new renewable energy facilities - to reduce the need for fossil fuel. Just feed it back to the power grid.

Also - are you suggesting to "Make the parking lot only partly covered" just because want to give EVs the better (shaded) spots? Seems like a waste of the extra energy you could get by covering the entire lot...

I'd love a covered highway. Protect against rain, snow, dawn/dusk sunlight blinding the driver. Focus on the East to West highways first.

I could be wrong on this but i thought i remembered some engineer youtuber saying that sun panels naturally emit enough heat to prevent snow from forming? (Fact check me on that)

Sunlight tends to be negligible during snowfall season, anyway.

Car parks are places, where cars grow instead of trees.