These are really a great way to reclaim some power. Some times however you'll want 15' clearance so that you can drive delivery trucks to the stores under them. But overall it just makes a lot of sense. In California at least I've seen these projects get killed by squabbling between the person willing to fund the work, the management company/developer that currently has the lease rights to the location, and the underlying land owner who is leasing the land to the developer. I have suggested to my representatives that perhaps something like the "you must approve this sort of plan" laws that would facilitate California's commitment to becoming 100% renewable.
As in the picture accompanying the article, the solar shades don't need to cover the entire area. You can leave open sky over corridors to allow trucks through.
They can be built 20' off the ground, but they will always be built 2' shorter than the most important truck that needs to park there 10 years after the ribbon-cutting.
If that's really a concern, just build them with the clearance required of bridges over interstate highways, which is ~16 feet.
Or provide a separate area for huge vehicles - even if people transporting 200-ton mining haul trucks want to stop off at Wal-Mart en route, it's not like they'll expect to pull into standard bays.
Unlike for a bridge, having an articulation which pulls the panels out of the way adds little expense. Solar panels are light enough that keeping them still in high winds is the main constraint.
Sending 2 larger trucks to do the job if 3 smaller trucks is innately more efficient.
The 18-wheeler format (even with 2x trailers or even 3x trailers) has built in efficiencies. We probably should think about how to support those kinds of efficiencies in grocery stores / Walmart centers.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Walmart uses larger trucks like that on a consistent basis as a cornerstone of its logistic strategy.
In the case of my local (urban) grocery store, it seems to be the reverse. Coke and beer arrive on their own 18 wheelers that barely fit down the street. Produce is another 18 wheeler owned by the grocery company. Bread, fish, meat, dairy, and chips all have their own medium to large box trucks.
And this is at a grocery store with only 2 loading dock bays directly off a fairly busy street, and a total of about 8 customer parking spaces. This is the absolute best case for unloading everything at a warehouse and shipping point to point with a few box trucks instead of making it a stop on everyone's literal or figurative milk run, yet they don't do it.
I'm pretty sure reducing truck-miles barely registers when it comes to "efficiencies" in logistics.
I'm pretty sure that the areas those trucks drive through and park in can be easly determined and separated from the main customer parking lot. In the absolute worst case, you might have to dismantle some of the solar canopies when a problem appears.
Maybe all types of shelter covers will be replaced by solar panels once they're cheap and efficient enough. Canopies, roofs...
My house is almost 100% covered by solar panels, they pretty much are my roof. It's really nice. I wonder how much energy we could generate if every house had solar panels instead of roofs. There probably aren't enough batteries in the world to store all that power.
It’ll go a long way towards having sizable battery capacity with an electrified vehicle fleet. But there’s also just building out electrical capacity. The industrial revolution and onward is also a story of humanity having much more access and usage for energy per capita than ever. If energy costs are low enough then direct air capture of carbon becomes a “sure, why not,” for instance. Major power infrastructure was built solely to unlock aluminum when the uses for it were discovered. Energy production capacity never dreamt of before that point.
Yes! What if we could have a post-scarcity energy society? If we generate so much energy it might as well be infinite, there is no need to economize at all. No need to worry about consumption. Direct carbon capture? Sure. Water desalinization? Absolutely. The efficiency of these processes stops mattering.
Solar power with batteries for everything, nuclear energy as backup.
The community college down the road from me has them. Couple things:
1) the projects are very expensive, for their project it cost $13mil, is expected to last 25 years, and saves them a total of $15mil. So a $2mil saving IFF no more than a few panels prematurely fail.
2) it still doesn’t get them off the grid.
Until panels become cheaper, or last longer and become more efficient, this isn’t viable to do everywhere.
I see this kind of thinking a lot. We often focus on the change itself rather than on the systemic response to the change. I used an analogy once to show how I thought about it that went like this, "The only thing Excedrin does is trick your nervous system into not reporting that you have a headache, so it's worthless?" In context people can go from 100% functional to 100% non-functional when gripped with a migrane or severe headache. The meds can mitigate the symptom and they can get stuff done that they wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.
So covering parking lots has a couple of externalizing factors as well. First, it really does mitigate CO2 pollution by replacing fossil fuel power with PV generated power. It also makes customers more willing to spend more time in your store if their car isn't being baked. And finally if it saved you $2M over 25 years, that is $80,000 a year which allows you to hire additional service staff that aren't being paid out of sales margins, and the increased level of service has been shown to both support more sales and higher margins[1].
What I'm trying so illustrate here is that there are additional factors over a straight "saves a bit more than it costs".
[1] There is a wonderful report on how Nordstroms became the most valuable per sq ft store because they focused on service, service, service. I believe it came from the Harvard Business school but it I didn't find it with a quick search of my archived papers.
We’re all well aware of the additional factors, though some of those you pointed out (like shade for your car increasing visitation time) are a bit weak. But reality sets in and the world isn’t without scarcity yet. Therefore we have to pay attention to things like cost.
You also assume that their savings won’t be needed for something else. Who’s paying for the next installation after this one needs replacing after 25 years? The $2m they save over 25 years isn’t enough.
