We Should Put Solar Panels Above Parking Lots
Why Putting Solar Canopies on Parking Lots Is a Smart Green Move
A typical Walmart supercenter, for instance, has a five-acre parking lot, and it’s a wasteland, especially if you have to sweat your way across it under an asphalt-bubbling sun. Put a canopy over it, though, and it could support a three-megawatt solar array… the canopy would [also] shade customers… If Walmart did that at all 3,571 of its U.S. super centers, the total capacity would be 11.1 gigawatts of solar power — roughly equivalent to a dozen large coal-fired power plants.
Solar panels atop the upper parking lot at Lafayette station, California (via wikimedia).
It is more expensive to build the solar arrays and infrastructure above existing parking lots (compared to an empty field) but it is a great use to space. We should be encouraging such development.
Related: Molten Salt Solar Reactor Approved by California (2010) – Large Scale Redox Flow Battery (2017) – Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods
