alt Hacker NewsIt seems inefficient to put solar panels over parking areas as it requires significant amount of structure which costs a lot more than shade it creates is worth. Especially compared to how much less structure is needed on more remote solar farms.
Maybe I'm just using American mindset where there is lots of open land that is good for solar generation? Perhaps not true in Korea?
Replies
>It seems inefficient to put solar panels over parking areas as it requires significant amount of structure which costs a lot more than shade it creates is worth
If you're putting up structures to shade cars from bright sun anyway then it doesn't take a lot of legislative pressure to enforce "the thing you put up has to be solar panels".
Not familiar with SK, but in principle this parking shade had better be panels works. This is doable within both governmental, social and financial frameworks in countries that get decent sun. Whether SK qualifies as "decent sun"...idk...seems borderline to my unqualified eye
In a city the best place to put them first is roof tops. Rooftop solar has minimal structural requirements relative to parking lot canopies.
I think this might be partially an indirect tax on parking lots inside a dense city. It raises the cost of using land for parking, but does so in a way that provides shade and clean energy at the same time.
I'm an American, and it seems like a great use of land to me. This sort of a policy is particularly sensible in areas where it's hot, and there are extensive parking lots next to places that are mostly active during the day.
Instead of just having a heat island, you generate power to run AC in the associated buildings, and you also get shade for the parked cars.
South Korea is pretty mountainous so yes, available land is much less compared to America where we have square miles upon square miles of open land. South Korea is little less the size of Kentucky.
A flat parking lot is already a ridiculously inefficient use of resources. Putting solar panels on top directly improves quality of life (through shade) and claws back a bit of that inefficiency.
South Korea has a population density of 507/km² [1]
For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area has a population density of 430/km² [2]
I doubt they have vast tracts of undeveloped land. And while solar panels can replace agricultural land or wooded areas, doing so isn't always a big political win.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
I don’t think it’s that much more - it’s really just extending the length of the pilings used in regular ground mounted utility scale solar?
It seems inefficient to not put solar panels over a parking lot. I'm not sure how shade is a major consideration here or how light weight solar panels are a large expense compared to the cost of space in a city. Parking garages are often net negatives to cities and parking lots are generally major negatives to cities since they drive density down and reduce foot traffic (which reduces economic churn). At least this way the city gets another small use out of that area in the form of some local electricity generation. Density and variety of use are major factors in urban health.
It doesn’t really matter if there’s land that would theoretically be more ideal if the value of the power generated pays for the infrastructure buildout. The best land for solar panels is the land you can build on now.
Something like 70% of the Korean peninsula is mountainous, and a lot of the space between mountains is taken up by cities and farms. This puts flat land at a bit of a premium
Correct. There really isnt “more remote” in Korea because it’s such a small nation geographically speaking. You’re never more than a few hours from the farthest border.
Yes, build far away and wait 30 years for transmission lines to be built or to be connected to the grid.
Building where people live means (near) zero transmission infrastructure.
it seems wildly efficient to use the massive amount of dead space we cede to cars. Without cars, parking lots are just massive heat sinks that trap and hold heat. Might as well do something with them to make it a little bit better. It also has the added benefit of creating shade for people in the summer and cover during rain.
Dedicated parking areas are hugely inefficient in the first place from an economic perspective, so this is at least getting some double duty out of them.
It adds utility to an arguably less useful use of space (shut up, I used use two words in a row and twice here), minimizes transmission costs and losses (the power is needed right there in the parking lot or where the people parking there are going to), and doesn't displace other land use (farms or nature).
Building solar panel installations in remote locations still requires linking that back to the main grid, and all the in-between infrastructure needed to transform and transmit that power. Building it in an urban location allows you to tap into the existing grid without much added public investment, similar to how some power grids will purchase power from homeowners as an added incentive for doing a home solar install.