Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts. My biggest hope is that this policy creates a marketplace with actual competition that comes up with more cost efficient mounting solutions that make it practical worldwide.
Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space. While adding solar on them doesn't solve the last issue, it does help mitigate the heat island effect and solar panels are no less ugly than asphalt. Plus it is power creation right next to where it is being consumed for minimal transfer losses. It's also much nicer for the vehicles parked there to be in the shade.
I’d much rather look out across a city and see solar panel islands rather than a coal smoke stack belching smoke, a nuke cooling tower or a massive dam.
Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind
I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams. They're majestic in the same way ancient pyramids are majestic. On top of being useful infrastructure and not just oversized landscaping pieces.
The problem with dams is that for the most part in the West all the good sites near population centers have been taken. In developing countries you have the issue of new dams potentially making older downstream ones less useful, which is now a real conflict point with Egypt vs Sudan vs Ethiopia, Afghanistan vs Iran, China vs India and SEA, etc.
In addition, because silt will back up in reservoirs there are an increasing amount of old dams where removal makes more sense than spending more money on dredging and maintaining the dam; and with droughts becoming more common hydro is not as reliable for baseload anymore.
> I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams.
^That’s not “cherry picking.“ They are saying the two things that they would not mind seeing in the distance. It is reasonable to assume that it was not an omission to avoid hurting their point, but rather that coal power smoke stacks are not on list.
It strikes me as the much more obvious reading. “Of the things you listed, these two don’t really bother me.”
We need you to avoid perpetuating or escalating flamewars on HN. Energy/climate topics are among the most predictable flamebait topics, and as a longtime user we need to see you being circumspect and making your contributions de-escalatory rather than escalatory. We've had to ask you several times before respect the site's guidelines and purpose. Please try harder.
You and I can disagree about interpretation all day long but there’s no misinterpreting your incredibly condescending tone. Have a good rest of your Sunday man.
Call it what you want, either way it was rude and unnecessary.
As for your point: If that’s what he’s doing then he’s doing a piss poor job because several of us clearly heard an implied “but not coal fire plant smoke stacks” while he said infrastructure for renewables on the skyline can be pretty.
That's not even unique to nuclear. Gas and coal can have them too. Typically they're only used if the other source of coolant is not sufficient.
For example, you take in cooling water from a river. When the river gets too hot in summer you want to use that cooling tower to evaporate water to provide additional cooling.
What about the billions of tons of solar panels that turn to toxic garbage every 20 years or so, and can't yet be recycled? Not to mention the huge amount of land consumed by solar farms.
Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower.
In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV.
There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.
Yes, electricity is becoming very cheap in China, and it will be difficult for the West to keep up here. Exorbitant US tariffs are also counterproductive, as they only serve to secure monopoly profits for old utilities.
Everyone who has an electricity bill or pays taxes should be against new-build nuclear power because it is pretty much the most expensive way to produce electricity. You should instead lobby for wind, solar, and even closing coal power plants in favour of modern natural gas plants. All of those will cut more emissions, more quickly, per dollar spent.
Base load is something of the past. Base load does no longer exist as such as during daytimes the solar curve will / should push it to zero as surplus capacity is cheap.
Running base load plays at night is then also no longer sensible.
Given the trend line of the cost of renewables + storage, by the time you’ve built one if you start now we could’ve done it cheaper and easier with renewables in most locations in the world.
Let's also not forget about the haze of photochemical smog everywhere there are combustion vehicles.
Today I walked by someone dropping off people from his diesel VW Passat B6. You could smell that thing from afar and it bothers me that it's still considered roadworthy.
I admit this is subjective, but they're giant ugly concrete chimney-like structures spewing stuff into the air. Sure, intellectually I know it's just water vapor and they're form is dictated by their function, but they look like they belong in some pollution riddled dystopian hellscape.
I'm actually pro-nuclear power, but the cooling towers are a pretty significant eyesore and a non-trivial downside. But apparently some people hate the way wind turbines look while I think they're sleek and futuristic looking, so taste as ever is subjective.
They’re elegant structures venting water vapor into the atmosphere. It looks like clean power. Way nicer than solar panels, which take up a lot of space.
And that's just the direct impacts from failure. Long-term environmental costs are real, if indirect.
I write this somewhat reluctantly as hydro is carbon-neutral,* and affords one of the better energy-storage options, as pumped hydro. Even allowing that dam failures tend to occur under regimes with significant organisational issues (low trust, low public concern, low levels of organisation, conflicted interests), dams have a pretty horrific track record for direct fatalities. Almost all those risks are mitigatable, and the underlying root cause (organisational dysfunction) would likely create similar risk patterns for other energy modalities. But we have a direct history to point to.
I've written on this topic a few times at HN should you or others be interested, I do hope my thoughts come across as nuanced, as they in fact are:
‘Health’ is generally used to refer to things like pollution, etc. that cause long term chronic impacts.
Not individual sudden events which drown/murder massive numbers of people regardless of their general health status (except perhaps for their ability to run really fast and really far on no notice).
So are cholera and other diseases accompanying flooding.
And other factors associated with reservoirs: desertification and lake evaporation can lead to increased dust, common where water is diverted or impounded (Aral Sea, Lake Powell, Lake Mead). Disruption of silt flows has various impacts, more on the general environmental side.
Generally, if your concern is overall mortality risk rather than a specific disease/pollution mechanism, dams do not get a free pass.
The public health department doesn’t concern itself with things like national defense, if skyscrapers are likely to fall over or not, and local gang violence. Those have their own specialities.
Otherwise, literally everything is a ‘health issue’, including agriculture and commercial/residential zoning.
And notably, no one has actually provided any examples of where any of these are actually in major cities. Because it’s absurd, hah.
I haven’t seen an active smokestack with actual smoke in a city in decades, dams are where mountains are - and usually require the opposite terrain for a city, and no one builds nuke plants in major cities. That would be silly.
I personally don't know but I feel like, we also need to think of the environmental changes of something like solar batteries if we store the energy
There was a michael moore's documentary regarding climate change and I personally think that the best solution climate-wise speaking is probably nuclear but the whole world's sentiment is so regulated by lobby-ists which is why the cost of production of them and regulations shot up to an unreasonable amounts but the world was already transitioning to nuclear energies.
There are some new modular approaches to it which aren't as efficient but feel safer to the general public but nuclear is one of the most safest and compact sources of massive amounts of energy generation compared to solar and wind.
Nuclear Energy is cool.
Now am I right/wrong in saying this, let me know, I think I am right but I maybe wrong too, but its just that every expert I have seen on this topic really prefer's nuclear and my own "research" on this topic makes me feel the same really.
Somebody should write more clearly as to why nuclear is superior to solar and the others as a comment as I feel like I have written similar things atleast once more and maybe if there could be a nice website like why.nuclear or why-nuclear.net etc. which could give points of why nuclear is a superior form, it could be really great and I would love to hear more arguments both good and bad comparison with nuclear (primarily) and maybe comparing it with solar if somebody's an expert on this topic as I would love to hear an expert about it as well.
No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting. You have to build for more wind loading. For a car to crash into it and not fall over. And now that the public is around, build that much stronger to never fall over. And secure the wiring that much better against the public.
Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.
> Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space.
I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.
My personal thought is to saturate rooftops before going for the poorer ROI parking lot PV canopies.
>Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.
Yeah, who needs to eat anyway? Lol it is perfectly fine to put this shit in parking lots. In hot climates, it's a benefit to customers to have covered parking. The wiring should be no more fragile than, say, power lines or lighting fixtures in the area. Parking lots are also better because it doesn't matter as much if water leaks between or around the solar panels. Putting them on rooftops tends to cause roof leaks and it presents problems for roof repairs.
>I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.
Higher temps around black PVs should be similar to black asphalt. Also, the thermal mass of the PVs is lower, so they will not stay as hot in the evening.
There are probably issues with PVs related to ice buildup and hail. They probably don't make sense in places with those issues.
Fuel ethanol is stupid too. It is made from corn, which could be used to feed people or at least animals. Anyway the point is, there is plenty of land that could have solar panels on it besides farm land. Farm land is too important to waste. We will starve if we don't have enough of it. You should always grow more food than you technically need. Crops can fail, and you can't eat solar panels or credit cards.
Fuel ethanol mostly exists because the US grows way too much corn to actually eat and we needed something to do with it. Industrial farming overshot what we needed to sustain the population and threatened to put a lot of farmers out of business.
This is one of the hidden benefits of corn ethanol, if there is some nutrition crunch it is trivial to convert back to farming food corn unlike switchgrass ethanol. There is no equipment to change out, no supply chains to rework, you just change which type of corn you plant and send the harvest to the market instead of the refiner.
I love the idea but execution will determine if this is better for pedestrians. Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level.
Hopefully this will be the sort of thing where we try different strategies quickly and pick winners and losers.
India has done a lot of work with covering irrigation canals with solar, and in some ways that’s a simpler problem so it makes sense that this is happening now instead of earlier. Big successful systems start as small successful ones. Maybe there is some substantial knowledge transfer that can occur there.
>Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level
There's certainly no need for the support superstructure to need more pillars and members than your typical multi deck parking structure and while yes some have bad sightlines a majority are totally fine.
> ”the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.“
Yes, but if you’re building shade canopies over the parking lot anyway (this is quite common in southern Europe, for example) the marginal cost to add solar to the design will be relatively small. And if the government is backing it, production volumes will rise so it’s no longer a niche product. Economies of scale.
Solar already has economies of scale. There are three types of projects called out in How Big Projects Get Done and what they all have in common is that what you do on day 25 is mostly refinement of what you were doing on day four. Those are roads, solar, and wind projects. The self similarity means you are more likely to hit your targets. Because you just go faster and faster as you figure out the choreography. And the known unknowns.
Some stores build parking for peak traffic days and a few people have suggested that it would be better if the outer bits of your lot were built using permeable pavement to reduce the amount of runoff that has to go onto the storm sewers. The little rain gardens we see now do something but not much.
Will self-driving cars cut down on parking lots? Seems like they'll be much smaller/denser once the car can even just self park (don't have to leave room on left/right for opening doors, and can even stack tighter/front back as long as you're smart about shuffling them).
And of course, once more people are using self-driving cars instead of owning their own, cars will have less idle time spent in lots.
> Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space.
Wait until you hear about public transit...
> Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.
Not really. You don't need anything unusual, just regular flat panels. The main expense is building the canopy itself to conform to all the requirements for hurricane/seismic resistance.
You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back. It's so much more efficient than everyone having to use their own time to all individually make that effort.
I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state.
Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI)
> You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back.
Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?
> I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars.
Now do that with transit. Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes). It absolutely is true of Helsinki. Try dropping 100 random points on the city map and plot the routes between all of them, for both cars and transit. You'll find that cars are typically 3x faster.
> Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?
Yes. In a well-designed city, a car trip will give you more time to do that.
> What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
Not large, at most 300000 population, and designed for the needs of people, not for bike-lanes. So wide roads, plenty of parking (including parking lots), low density, large houses providing plenty of space, etc.
I live in NYC. Less than 1% of our population works on supporting transit (when you add in tourists and commuters, it's ~0.7%). And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.
Plus, parking is simultaneously way too cheap (~3 million free parking spaces on some of the most valuable real estate in the world) and way too expensive for most people (garages by me start at $350/mo). So in order to keep a car, I'd either need to waste thousands of dollars on a garage or hundreds of hours driving around trying to find free parking.
The new law requires the installation of solar panels in all *public* parking lots operated by the government. I checked this through local news sources.
In South Korea, there are already incentives to install solar panels on buildings, including parking lots. If you operate a solar power system with a capacity of over 20 kW, you can sell the generated electricity at prices higher than the market rate thanks to government support programs.
Despite these benefits, many parking lots in South Korea still do not install solar panels. This is mainly because, given the country’s high population density, most parking lots are located on land that is considered potential development sites. Once solar panels are installed, it becomes more difficult to change the land use later for development purposes, and the owners would also have to bear additional costs for removing the panels.
I recall malls in the Gauteng area sometimes having netting or shade cloth over car parking bays. As a way to prevent hail damage to cars that can occur occasionally but unpredictably. Leaving your car out under the sky for hours was a risk.
I wonder how well the solar panels will stand up to hail.
Some parts of the interior of the USA will have very similar hail considerations.
Was wondering about it too but seems like it’s either not an issue or they’re using panels resistant to it.
I have noticed though that they never seem to put them in flat. Always in quite an angle that doesn’t seem sun direction motivated. Usually v shape with car under each side of the v. Maybe thats for hail or possible to help rain clean it.
This is not a bad idea. EVs can charge during the day, go home fully charged, connect to the grid and supply power to the grid. EV batteries are humongous and a large number of them will become an energy reservoir. All excess production during the day (which is being curtailed now) can be stored in Evs and reused later throughout the day.
The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
I'm an EV owner and homeowner and looked into V2X when planning my solar/residential battery system.
On the home side, the hardware is largely there. The charger I'm buying and many others support it - though many need a future software update. On the vehicle side though, it's very inconsistent; there are only a few vehicles that support it and even for those, what my installer told me is that the manufacturer warranties typically either void the warranty entirely if V2(G/H) is used or harshly limit the amount of energy that can be used. They're concerned that it will lead to excess wear on the battery, the main component of an EV.
And I think I agree with them. With current battery technology, I don't think using EVs as a grid-scale storage system for renewables is viable. For grid-scale or residential storage, you want a battery that can be as heavy and physically large as it needs to be but it needs to deal with a lot of charge/discharge cycles. Your best option here right now is LiFePO. For the kind of EV people are generally willing to buy right now, you need to cram as much range into the car as you can, which means the battery needs to be as energy-dense as possible and charge/discharge cycles are less of a concern. That means LiPo.
I think the most realistic use of EVs for grid-scale integration is what they're calling "virtual plant", where they're treated like a separate source of energy that the grid can tap into in exceptional situations.
This seems really inefficient, everyone transporting around a bunch of excess capacity? Smaller, lighter, cheaper electric cars paired with a properly built and resilient grid seems like a better goal to me.
They’d wear out roads less, use less resources to make, be safer to others in crashes, etc. I dislike the trend of increasingly larger vehicles just to move a single person around 87% of the time.
Extra "wasted" capacity has many benefits for EV battery packs.
It allows distributing load across more cells. It allows using cells with a lower C-rating, which typically have better energy density, and longer lifespan.
Distributing load reduces energy loss during charging, makes cooling less demanding, while allowing higher total charging power, which means adding more range per minute.
The excess capacity makes it easier to avoid fully changing and discharging cells. This prolongs life of NMC cells.
(but I agree that cars are an inefficient mode of transport in general)
V2G is a pipe dream. Nobody has gotten out of the pilot program phase, largely because the return on investment isn't convincing. If you can't make a profit off it it doesn't happen.
Seems a bit early to come to this conclusion, but I would also suspect, that the value of a parking garage full of EVs is not in providing energy to the grid but as a large scale consumer for load shaping.
What do you mean? If the house takes less energy from the grid (compared to doing nothing) it's effectively the same as if the house uses the same energy while also feeding the grid with the car's battery. The former, however, takes less additional infrastructure.
The utility. The utility operates a 24/7 electricity marketplace that perfectly matches supply and demand. Supply must follow demand. If demand decreases, pricing becomes negative until supply decreases. This is problematic because we aren't utilizing all the excess energy generated by solar and wind. Which is all free.
Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...
Ive read this (as much as i can due to paywalls) but still don’t get it. Why would anyone pay to get of power? And if that happens, why would they build a solar farm over a carpark ton pay users of that power?
Someone with generation that takes time to curtail will need somewhere to put it; at the limit, they may pay someone else to take it. Also, some generators are getting paid in multiple ways, if you're getting a subsidy for every kWh you put on the grid, you might be willing to pay for the privilege of putting it out there.
I agree though, if the typical case is negative pricing, during solar peak, it doesn't make sense to build more solar capacity. One trend is to have solar panels oriented toward morning or evening sun rather than midday sun, less kWh generated overall, but possibly more valuable kWh due to time of day.
If you get enough grid accessible battery capacity, during normal conditions, the price ceiling falls and the floor raises. Of course, when all the batteries are full or empty, the price can go negative again.
If you set the app to allow it to be drained overnight, then it may be drained overnight. Similar to forgetting to pump gas into the tank and getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Most people are a bit smarter than that.
What about the top 10% or 20%? It would be just like using “reserve mode” but you’d get paid for it. And have the option to turn it off before a road trip.
And have extra wear on your battery that would far outweigh anything you’d get out of it?
I’m down about 18% capacity after 4 years of owning my current EV. It’s still plenty for my needs but I would be very disappointed if I saw this capacity drop much sooner or if it drops much more.
A replacement would be ~$15k and the cost of replacing the car would be a lot greater.
I’m very much digging the current strategy of grid-tied batteries and the myriad of companies working to re-use battery packs for grid batteries.
If it's any reassurance, I think the consensus is that the rate of degradation of your battery will slow considerably once it gets past 20% (of the order of 1-2% per year, i.e. the battery will outlast the rest of the vehicle by a long way) [0].
If $15k gets you a pretty big LFP battery, then you can get hundreds of thousands of kWh of use under gentle conditions like V2G. There are plenty of situations where 2-5 cents of wear per kWh is very worth it.
And if you do replace that battery, and you can't get a huge discount from selling the old one, then slap on a $500 inverter and install it at your house to keep using for the next 20 years.
I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.
Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
Depends, there have been cases where certain cases or classes of consumers get discounts. Time based pricing was one example. Industrial and commercial rates can have these types of claw backs as well.
We have a similar law in France. Something is unclear to me though:
"build a conceptually similar, 657 kW solar carport system across 12 parking lots (shown, above) that delivers more than 1.23 million kWh of clean, emissions-free power annually and offsets the equivalent of 185,000 vehicles’ worth of harmful carbon emissions."
Not sure what that means but that doesn't seem right.
"Here in the US, we’re proving that out, too – the Northwest Fire District in Arizona partnered with Standard Solar to build a conceptually similar, 657 kW solar carport system across 12 parking lots (shown, above) that delivers more than 1.23 million kWh of clean, emissions-free power annually and offsets the equivalent of 185,000 vehicles’ worth of harmful carbon emissions."
I have to wonder if they are taking into account the AC usage or other factors to get there; When you park in the shade, you don't have to cool your car down nearly as much. This effect is greater in hot deserts with lots of sun. There are likely other benefits to the vehicles and infrastructure.
The average emissions for a car is 4.6 tons of co2.
The average carbon intensity of U.S. electricity generation is around 384 grams of co2 per kWh.
1230000 * 0.384 / 1000 = 472 tons.
But 185000 cars emit 851000 tons so 500 tons is like a rounding error, unless I am mistaken.
Either it’s a full on hallucination or they intend the power to be used to charge electric vehicles. Which is a stretch because solar parking isn’t going to sell that many electric vehicles. It will sell some, but not that many more.
I wish the IRA infrastructure bill from a few years ago had included something like this. Not the total mandate, but these should be subsidized and encouraged. These installations actually improve an area and have multiple benefits. Instead the US bill incentivizes detroying large swaths of wild land which is unfortunate.
Their new law requires parking lots with more than 80 spaces to have solar panels.
Great idea, where I live I'm pretty much maxing out the percentage of permitted structures allowed by zoning.
I could imagine that if solar panel carports didn't count towards structure limits, I'd build a carport across my absurdly large driveway :)
I think there are lots of "free" ways we could incentivize private construction of solar panels -- even without monetary subsidies.
Or we could even tax people for not doing it. In Denmark your land is taxed based on what it's zoned for, and how it could be utilized (not how it is utilized).
Depends on country, some have fixed ratios based on occupancy or square footage of shopping area. Which they could shrink, but it would raise the final price per square foot (land price stays the same and most construction costs don’t get that much smaller if you shave off a few hundred sqft).
I think I would like it if it better if it were an either or.
Either solar panels, or rain gardens, or permeable pavement, or canopy, or some combination.
But then again that might make loopholes that make my head spin. Might have to leave the higher rung up to organizations like LEED and leave the minimums as one or maybe two choices. Maybe make the other harder than solar unless you have a weird situation where say adding trees is simpler than running power distribution, like across the street from the shop.
It doesn’t matter. I’m in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton and my rooftop solar makes $1000 of power a year. Solar is so cheap now, and still falling, it makes sense literally everywhere.
Why aren't new developments including rooftop solar as a standard selling feature? If it makes sense it should be a no brainer right? Your new $800,000 home comes with a solar installation so you never pay for heating, cooling, power supply.
This is definitely nitpicky, but a better translation (imo) for "gemeente" is municipality. You're spot on otherwise. Tbf though, in much of the Randstad, a car is not a requirement for a good life and if the new residential developments are properly equipped with good OV connections, then we should use that space for parking to instead build more homes.
Since moving from the US to (rural) Limburg, I've been shocked how much less I need to drive. My partner still drives to work every day, but even then, they will come home and then walk to the supermarket instead of stopping with the car.
Those are already a large part in housing costs, and rooftop solar panels? That's both roofing work and installation of advanced electric equipment. And the market doesn't seem to have that many people who base their buying decisions on whether the house has solar panels installed.
Labor costs are going to stick around until we get humanoid robots to work well. But the permitting situation could sure benefit from a lot of regulation being purged.
I believe this is due in the UK (from 2027) which is quite far north from the equator: new homes need a certain percentage of the roof covered in solar cells.
It won't be enough to be self sufficient but it does offset a bit I guess
I will never stop to amaze me how far to the south the USA is compared to Europe on average. I live near Berlin and even most Canadians live further to the south than me.
The West coast is much more similar though. Paris is at a latitude between Seattle and Vancouver while San Francisco is a little south of Lisbon. Both have pretty comparable climates.
Being further north does have some advantages. If the panels are angled more to get a better view of the sun they will also be better at shedding snow loads.
It floors me that the whole world is pretty content saying “okay cool solar/wind/renewables” and then theres the uneducated states of america who is rejecting all of it
This is performative. If it were economically viable there'd be panels in parking lots. They're not because the land isn't the expensive part. It's the installation, maintenance, and ancillary equipment that makes solar expensive these days.
It's probably not going to do that either. The number of spaces per lot will move to below the limit and more lots will be created to make up the difference. The net will likely be less efficient utilization of lots leading to more overall land usage
Sometimes we do things that the market has failed to price properly because there is still value not captured in the economics. That is not performance, that is internalizing unpriced externalities. The free market, perfect information, and perfect prices do not exist.
Yes, because the fossil fuel and energy markets are famously free of political/economic manipulation, and military and ideological intervention .. by both state and private actors.
Don't worry, the US is actively trying to export that rejection, too, so it won't be alone. See Trump's messed up rant at the UN, and the policies and proposals of his conservative allies here in Canada.
Alberta was the the fastest growing renewable producer in Canada due to high winds and long solar days and low cloud cover. The provincial government in the pocket of the oil industry banned renewable developments for months under the excuse that it was "destroying farmland" and then came back months later with a policy that hamstringed future development.
to these people, renewables are a threat because they can't be a parasite off it.
The astonishing thing to me is that the production of solar panels is a huge source of mining and manufacturing jobs. Just like heat pumps. If we were serious about the objectives stated by the conservatives, Canada could easily be a world leader with Alberta and Saskatchewan profiting handsomely.
As always, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And if we take Conservative talking points in good faith, proctective trade policies buttress the economy in the long term. Right?
But I think you're wrong about the extractive side -- Canada has huge rare earth reserves, and while tapping into them does require an investment of time and effort, there's no reason we couldn't compete with China there.
And don't even get me started on how unattractive Canadian oil is on the international market. The same "can't compete with China" flavor of argument should apply just as well there if it makes any real sense.
Massive silicon crystal growth factories are. And they are a major capital investment. A capital investment China did almost a decade ago at large scale.
As an American who usually gets mistaken for a Canadian while traveling, I know that some of us know they aren’t talking about us, but also that the people who they are talking about aren’t even in the conversation.
It’s effectively talking about people behind their back which is not that useful.
Netflix a wild one to include in that list, imo. What makes you think it's on the same level? If you're making some reference to "cultural importance" I would wager that ABC/CBS in the 90s had just as strong a pull as Netflix does today culturally.
Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts. My biggest hope is that this policy creates a marketplace with actual competition that comes up with more cost efficient mounting solutions that make it practical worldwide.
Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space. While adding solar on them doesn't solve the last issue, it does help mitigate the heat island effect and solar panels are no less ugly than asphalt. Plus it is power creation right next to where it is being consumed for minimal transfer losses. It's also much nicer for the vehicles parked there to be in the shade.
I’d much rather look out across a city and see solar panel islands rather than a coal smoke stack belching smoke, a nuke cooling tower or a massive dam.
Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind
I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams. They're majestic in the same way ancient pyramids are majestic. On top of being useful infrastructure and not just oversized landscaping pieces.
Trivial national production compared with a single dam.
The problem with dams is that for the most part in the West all the good sites near population centers have been taken. In developing countries you have the issue of new dams potentially making older downstream ones less useful, which is now a real conflict point with Egypt vs Sudan vs Ethiopia, Afghanistan vs Iran, China vs India and SEA, etc.
In addition, because silt will back up in reservoirs there are an increasing amount of old dams where removal makes more sense than spending more money on dredging and maintaining the dam; and with droughts becoming more common hydro is not as reliable for baseload anymore.
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ACCount37 expressly left out the coal smoke stacks from their description, so I'm not sure why you chose to focus solely on that and throw it back in?
What are cooling towers for if not for coal smoke stacks?
Nuclear
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> I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams.
^That’s not “cherry picking.“ They are saying the two things that they would not mind seeing in the distance. It is reasonable to assume that it was not an omission to avoid hurting their point, but rather that coal power smoke stacks are not on list.
It strikes me as the much more obvious reading. “Of the things you listed, these two don’t really bother me.”
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> This is a truly bizarre comment chain.
> And since you're so keen on pointing out that this is public: you don't come off looking very great. Might wanna work on that.
Please edit out personal swipes from comments on HN. The guidelines ask us all to aim for better than this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm the one who gets warned? It gets even more bizarre!
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We need you to avoid perpetuating or escalating flamewars on HN. Energy/climate topics are among the most predictable flamebait topics, and as a longtime user we need to see you being circumspect and making your contributions de-escalatory rather than escalatory. We've had to ask you several times before respect the site's guidelines and purpose. Please try harder.
You and I can disagree about interpretation all day long but there’s no misinterpreting your incredibly condescending tone. Have a good rest of your Sunday man.
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Call it what you want, either way it was rude and unnecessary.
As for your point: If that’s what he’s doing then he’s doing a piss poor job because several of us clearly heard an implied “but not coal fire plant smoke stacks” while he said infrastructure for renewables on the skyline can be pretty.
the clouds comming off nuclear towers is literally just steam. not radioactive steam. just.... steam
That's not even unique to nuclear. Gas and coal can have them too. Typically they're only used if the other source of coolant is not sufficient.
For example, you take in cooling water from a river. When the river gets too hot in summer you want to use that cooling tower to evaporate water to provide additional cooling.
Which also explains why it's steam
What about the billions of tons of solar panels that turn to toxic garbage every 20 years or so, and can't yet be recycled? Not to mention the huge amount of land consumed by solar farms.
I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.
Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower.
In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV.
There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.
This is a prediction of the future, not an observation about the present / past like it's phrased as.
no, this are real world prices
https://www.infolink-group.com/spot-price/ https://wind.in-en.com/html/wind-2462559.shtml (chinese example)
BESS 5MWh 52 USD/kWh: https://www.metal.com/Battery-Cell-And-Module/202407100001
Yes, electricity is becoming very cheap in China, and it will be difficult for the West to keep up here. Exorbitant US tariffs are also counterproductive, as they only serve to secure monopoly profits for old utilities.
We are already cresting that hill. It’s happening now. It’s not happening everywhere, but it’s already happening.
Nuclear is attractive? Are we living on the same planet? I wish it was attractive but it’s quite obviously the opposite.
If you assume nuclear is only a 3 Mile Island waiting to happen, you're out of date.
You’re preaching to the choir here, I know nuclear is good and safe, but most people really don’t.
> ”I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.”
Everyone who has an electricity bill or pays taxes should be against new-build nuclear power because it is pretty much the most expensive way to produce electricity. You should instead lobby for wind, solar, and even closing coal power plants in favour of modern natural gas plants. All of those will cut more emissions, more quickly, per dollar spent.
But, is that what the average ratepayer wants? I personally want cheaper, more reliable power over any feelgood emission metrics.
I install solar on my rooftop because BESCOM is ripping me off, and net metering would occur help me get my bill to zero.
Base load is something of the past. Base load does no longer exist as such as during daytimes the solar curve will / should push it to zero as surplus capacity is cheap. Running base load plays at night is then also no longer sensible.
Given the trend line of the cost of renewables + storage, by the time you’ve built one if you start now we could’ve done it cheaper and easier with renewables in most locations in the world.
Let's also not forget about the haze of photochemical smog everywhere there are combustion vehicles.
Today I walked by someone dropping off people from his diesel VW Passat B6. You could smell that thing from afar and it bothers me that it's still considered roadworthy.
Diesel particles are heavy.
What if we designed nuclear cooling towers to be more aesthetic? Maybe it would become desirable to see.
What’s wrong with a nuke cooling tower?
I admit this is subjective, but they're giant ugly concrete chimney-like structures spewing stuff into the air. Sure, intellectually I know it's just water vapor and they're form is dictated by their function, but they look like they belong in some pollution riddled dystopian hellscape.
I'm actually pro-nuclear power, but the cooling towers are a pretty significant eyesore and a non-trivial downside. But apparently some people hate the way wind turbines look while I think they're sleek and futuristic looking, so taste as ever is subjective.
They’re elegant structures venting water vapor into the atmosphere. It looks like clean power. Way nicer than solar panels, which take up a lot of space.
Do you see any of those things now?
Personally, no. My brother does. My sister does.
Hundreds of millions of people do, and their health would improve if they didn’t.
I understand the complaint against coal power plants, but you're not saying that nuclear power plant or large dams cause health issues, right?
large dams do have pretty big environmental effects
None of them that impact people’s health.
Not even remotely true.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...>
And that's just the direct impacts from failure. Long-term environmental costs are real, if indirect.
I write this somewhat reluctantly as hydro is carbon-neutral,* and affords one of the better energy-storage options, as pumped hydro. Even allowing that dam failures tend to occur under regimes with significant organisational issues (low trust, low public concern, low levels of organisation, conflicted interests), dams have a pretty horrific track record for direct fatalities. Almost all those risks are mitigatable, and the underlying root cause (organisational dysfunction) would likely create similar risk patterns for other energy modalities. But we have a direct history to point to.
I've written on this topic a few times at HN should you or others be interested, I do hope my thoughts come across as nuanced, as they in fact are:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
‘Health’ is generally used to refer to things like pollution, etc. that cause long term chronic impacts.
Not individual sudden events which drown/murder massive numbers of people regardless of their general health status (except perhaps for their ability to run really fast and really far on no notice).
Those are referred to as ‘disasters’.
Death is a health risk.
So are cholera and other diseases accompanying flooding.
And other factors associated with reservoirs: desertification and lake evaporation can lead to increased dust, common where water is diverted or impounded (Aral Sea, Lake Powell, Lake Mead). Disruption of silt flows has various impacts, more on the general environmental side.
Generally, if your concern is overall mortality risk rather than a specific disease/pollution mechanism, dams do not get a free pass.
The public health department doesn’t concern itself with things like national defense, if skyscrapers are likely to fall over or not, and local gang violence. Those have their own specialities.
Otherwise, literally everything is a ‘health issue’, including agriculture and commercial/residential zoning.
And notably, no one has actually provided any examples of where any of these are actually in major cities. Because it’s absurd, hah.
Public health includes drowning……
Yeah, individually. Like in pools.
Dam failures are an entirely different department. Or just FEMA/military.
Nukes don’t often cause health issues, but from time to time…
I’m not aware of any sizable cities with coal smoke stacks, nuke towers, or visible large dams.
Are you?
Indeed. Both my brother and sister live in cities with those, and I’ve driving through literally hundreds on my way around the world
Examples/cite?
I haven’t seen an active smokestack with actual smoke in a city in decades, dams are where mountains are - and usually require the opposite terrain for a city, and no one builds nuke plants in major cities. That would be silly.
I personally don't know but I feel like, we also need to think of the environmental changes of something like solar batteries if we store the energy
There was a michael moore's documentary regarding climate change and I personally think that the best solution climate-wise speaking is probably nuclear but the whole world's sentiment is so regulated by lobby-ists which is why the cost of production of them and regulations shot up to an unreasonable amounts but the world was already transitioning to nuclear energies.
There are some new modular approaches to it which aren't as efficient but feel safer to the general public but nuclear is one of the most safest and compact sources of massive amounts of energy generation compared to solar and wind.
Nuclear Energy is cool.
Now am I right/wrong in saying this, let me know, I think I am right but I maybe wrong too, but its just that every expert I have seen on this topic really prefer's nuclear and my own "research" on this topic makes me feel the same really.
Somebody should write more clearly as to why nuclear is superior to solar and the others as a comment as I feel like I have written similar things atleast once more and maybe if there could be a nice website like why.nuclear or why-nuclear.net etc. which could give points of why nuclear is a superior form, it could be really great and I would love to hear more arguments both good and bad comparison with nuclear (primarily) and maybe comparing it with solar if somebody's an expert on this topic as I would love to hear an expert about it as well.
No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting. You have to build for more wind loading. For a car to crash into it and not fall over. And now that the public is around, build that much stronger to never fall over. And secure the wiring that much better against the public.
Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.
> Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space.
I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.
My personal thought is to saturate rooftops before going for the poorer ROI parking lot PV canopies.
> No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting.
> Better to replace some farmland
South Korea is very hilly, farmland is too precious to replace with PV and I don't think they have been growing biofuel crops there.
>Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.
Yeah, who needs to eat anyway? Lol it is perfectly fine to put this shit in parking lots. In hot climates, it's a benefit to customers to have covered parking. The wiring should be no more fragile than, say, power lines or lighting fixtures in the area. Parking lots are also better because it doesn't matter as much if water leaks between or around the solar panels. Putting them on rooftops tends to cause roof leaks and it presents problems for roof repairs.
>I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.
Higher temps around black PVs should be similar to black asphalt. Also, the thermal mass of the PVs is lower, so they will not stay as hot in the evening.
There are probably issues with PVs related to ice buildup and hail. They probably don't make sense in places with those issues.
> biodiesel or fuel-ethanol
> who needs to eat
You, uh, don't eat those.
Fuel ethanol is stupid too. It is made from corn, which could be used to feed people or at least animals. Anyway the point is, there is plenty of land that could have solar panels on it besides farm land. Farm land is too important to waste. We will starve if we don't have enough of it. You should always grow more food than you technically need. Crops can fail, and you can't eat solar panels or credit cards.
Fuel ethanol mostly exists because the US grows way too much corn to actually eat and we needed something to do with it. Industrial farming overshot what we needed to sustain the population and threatened to put a lot of farmers out of business.
This is one of the hidden benefits of corn ethanol, if there is some nutrition crunch it is trivial to convert back to farming food corn unlike switchgrass ethanol. There is no equipment to change out, no supply chains to rework, you just change which type of corn you plant and send the harvest to the market instead of the refiner.
> It's also much nicer for the vehicles parked there to be in the shade.
Pedestrians too.
Depends on the season!
In winter I'd park my car at a train station and be sure to have the windshield pointed west so the car would be a bit toasty when I got in.
I love the idea but execution will determine if this is better for pedestrians. Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level.
Hopefully this will be the sort of thing where we try different strategies quickly and pick winners and losers.
India has done a lot of work with covering irrigation canals with solar, and in some ways that’s a simpler problem so it makes sense that this is happening now instead of earlier. Big successful systems start as small successful ones. Maybe there is some substantial knowledge transfer that can occur there.
>Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level
There's certainly no need for the support superstructure to need more pillars and members than your typical multi deck parking structure and while yes some have bad sightlines a majority are totally fine.
> solar panels are no less ugly than asphalt.
Matter of taste. But I find geometric rows of tilted rectangles much less noisy (visually) than a zillion random cars, or an acre of cracked asphalt.
Solar operators aren’t cranking the bass so high that the windmills are leaving rust shadows on the road at stop lights.
Well, at least not so far.
I think maybe it was supposed to say “no more”
> ”the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.“
Yes, but if you’re building shade canopies over the parking lot anyway (this is quite common in southern Europe, for example) the marginal cost to add solar to the design will be relatively small. And if the government is backing it, production volumes will rise so it’s no longer a niche product. Economies of scale.
Solar already has economies of scale. There are three types of projects called out in How Big Projects Get Done and what they all have in common is that what you do on day 25 is mostly refinement of what you were doing on day four. Those are roads, solar, and wind projects. The self similarity means you are more likely to hit your targets. Because you just go faster and faster as you figure out the choreography. And the known unknowns.
Some stores build parking for peak traffic days and a few people have suggested that it would be better if the outer bits of your lot were built using permeable pavement to reduce the amount of runoff that has to go onto the storm sewers. The little rain gardens we see now do something but not much.
Will self-driving cars cut down on parking lots? Seems like they'll be much smaller/denser once the car can even just self park (don't have to leave room on left/right for opening doors, and can even stack tighter/front back as long as you're smart about shuffling them).
And of course, once more people are using self-driving cars instead of owning their own, cars will have less idle time spent in lots.
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> Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space.
Wait until you hear about public transit...
> Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.
Not really. You don't need anything unusual, just regular flat panels. The main expense is building the canopy itself to conform to all the requirements for hurricane/seismic resistance.
Subways and buses are vastly more efficient, both in terms of energy cost and rider throughput.
Nope. A large city might have 1-2% of it's entire population just working on supporting transit. It's _that_ wasteful.
Transit also destroys entire lifetimes worth of time every day by forcing people to wait or to suffer through inefficient routes.
That's why parking lots are the most beautiful structures in cities.
You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back. It's so much more efficient than everyone having to use their own time to all individually make that effort.
I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state.
Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI)
E: fixed mafs
> You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back.
Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?
> I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars.
Now do that with transit. Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes). It absolutely is true of Helsinki. Try dropping 100 random points on the city map and plot the routes between all of them, for both cars and transit. You'll find that cars are typically 3x faster.
> Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?
Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?
> Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes).
What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
> Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?
Yes. In a well-designed city, a car trip will give you more time to do that.
> What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
Not large, at most 300000 population, and designed for the needs of people, not for bike-lanes. So wide roads, plenty of parking (including parking lots), low density, large houses providing plenty of space, etc.
So your premise is that a city designed for cars is better for cars?
Just as cities designed for bikes are better for bikes, not people. Same idea.
I live in NYC. Less than 1% of our population works on supporting transit (when you add in tourists and commuters, it's ~0.7%). And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.
Plus, parking is simultaneously way too cheap (~3 million free parking spaces on some of the most valuable real estate in the world) and way too expensive for most people (garages by me start at $350/mo). So in order to keep a car, I'd either need to waste thousands of dollars on a garage or hundreds of hours driving around trying to find free parking.
Just a touch less, 0.92% according to the recent data.
> And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.
Well, yeah. NY is a hellscape of density.
The article is a bit misleading.
The new law requires the installation of solar panels in all *public* parking lots operated by the government. I checked this through local news sources.
In South Korea, there are already incentives to install solar panels on buildings, including parking lots. If you operate a solar power system with a capacity of over 20 kW, you can sell the generated electricity at prices higher than the market rate thanks to government support programs.
Despite these benefits, many parking lots in South Korea still do not install solar panels. This is mainly because, given the country’s high population density, most parking lots are located on land that is considered potential development sites. Once solar panels are installed, it becomes more difficult to change the land use later for development purposes, and the owners would also have to bear additional costs for removing the panels.
This happened pretty organically in south africa, especially on malls.
* Prevents being affected by grid blackouts
* Seen as progressive / eco by customers and ofc shade
* You've got captive demand - air-conditioning giant mall & food shops need industrial fridges
* Enough scale to do meaningful grid feed in
* Already have the infra to do generator switch over
* Access to financing and ability to plan over the 10 years or so that it takes to recover cost
I recall malls in the Gauteng area sometimes having netting or shade cloth over car parking bays. As a way to prevent hail damage to cars that can occur occasionally but unpredictably. Leaving your car out under the sky for hours was a risk.
I wonder how well the solar panels will stand up to hail.
Some parts of the interior of the USA will have very similar hail considerations.
Here's a recent article on the sub-industries that insure PV against hail, and predict and protect from hail:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/as-giant-hailstones-hit-the-suns...
Apparently in Australia climate change is making the hail bigger and more frequent.
You can't move the car protecting ones generally so it just comes down to making them tough and knowing your local weather, plus insurance.
Maybe the car insurance companies will cut you a check if you take the hit for them?
Was wondering about it too but seems like it’s either not an issue or they’re using panels resistant to it.
I have noticed though that they never seem to put them in flat. Always in quite an angle that doesn’t seem sun direction motivated. Usually v shape with car under each side of the v. Maybe thats for hail or possible to help rain clean it.
This is not a bad idea. EVs can charge during the day, go home fully charged, connect to the grid and supply power to the grid. EV batteries are humongous and a large number of them will become an energy reservoir. All excess production during the day (which is being curtailed now) can be stored in Evs and reused later throughout the day.
The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
I'm an EV owner and homeowner and looked into V2X when planning my solar/residential battery system.
On the home side, the hardware is largely there. The charger I'm buying and many others support it - though many need a future software update. On the vehicle side though, it's very inconsistent; there are only a few vehicles that support it and even for those, what my installer told me is that the manufacturer warranties typically either void the warranty entirely if V2(G/H) is used or harshly limit the amount of energy that can be used. They're concerned that it will lead to excess wear on the battery, the main component of an EV.
And I think I agree with them. With current battery technology, I don't think using EVs as a grid-scale storage system for renewables is viable. For grid-scale or residential storage, you want a battery that can be as heavy and physically large as it needs to be but it needs to deal with a lot of charge/discharge cycles. Your best option here right now is LiFePO. For the kind of EV people are generally willing to buy right now, you need to cram as much range into the car as you can, which means the battery needs to be as energy-dense as possible and charge/discharge cycles are less of a concern. That means LiPo.
I think the most realistic use of EVs for grid-scale integration is what they're calling "virtual plant", where they're treated like a separate source of energy that the grid can tap into in exceptional situations.
> That means LiPo.
IIRC the most popular EV battery technology today is LFP.
LFP now dominates ESS.
But for EVs, the vast majority in EU/US is NCM/NCA. China is about 6 to 4 LFP to NCM, but China's EV market is about 2/3+ of the global EV share.
This seems really inefficient, everyone transporting around a bunch of excess capacity? Smaller, lighter, cheaper electric cars paired with a properly built and resilient grid seems like a better goal to me.
They’d wear out roads less, use less resources to make, be safer to others in crashes, etc. I dislike the trend of increasingly larger vehicles just to move a single person around 87% of the time.
Extra "wasted" capacity has many benefits for EV battery packs.
It allows distributing load across more cells. It allows using cells with a lower C-rating, which typically have better energy density, and longer lifespan.
Distributing load reduces energy loss during charging, makes cooling less demanding, while allowing higher total charging power, which means adding more range per minute.
The excess capacity makes it easier to avoid fully changing and discharging cells. This prolongs life of NMC cells.
(but I agree that cars are an inefficient mode of transport in general)
Yeah, most commutes are less than 100 km but would you buy a car with 100-200km range? How's your range anxiety?
I'm not so sure about less resources as the majority of the car is still required only smaller battery.
V2G is a pipe dream. Nobody has gotten out of the pilot program phase, largely because the return on investment isn't convincing. If you can't make a profit off it it doesn't happen.
> V2G is a pipe dream.
Seems a bit early to come to this conclusion, but I would also suspect, that the value of a parking garage full of EVs is not in providing energy to the grid but as a large scale consumer for load shaping.
Seems like an easy solution would be for the car to provide energy for the house, rather than the entire grid, and reduce overall load.
Not too much of a difference if the house is connected to the grid.
What do you mean? If the house takes less energy from the grid (compared to doing nothing) it's effectively the same as if the house uses the same energy while also feeding the grid with the car's battery. The former, however, takes less additional infrastructure.
It means you don't need any mechanism to compensate the vehicle owner for using their battery.
Oh yes, the return on investment is very convincing for most of the big companies! Like Uber: https://uberlosses.com/
> The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
How would this work? Who is then paying for the solar?
The utility. The utility operates a 24/7 electricity marketplace that perfectly matches supply and demand. Supply must follow demand. If demand decreases, pricing becomes negative until supply decreases. This is problematic because we aren't utilizing all the excess energy generated by solar and wind. Which is all free.
Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r... (https://archive.is/nFsOk)
Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...
Edit: This is called curtailment. It is now ~20% and increasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
Ive read this (as much as i can due to paywalls) but still don’t get it. Why would anyone pay to get of power? And if that happens, why would they build a solar farm over a carpark ton pay users of that power?
Someone with generation that takes time to curtail will need somewhere to put it; at the limit, they may pay someone else to take it. Also, some generators are getting paid in multiple ways, if you're getting a subsidy for every kWh you put on the grid, you might be willing to pay for the privilege of putting it out there.
I agree though, if the typical case is negative pricing, during solar peak, it doesn't make sense to build more solar capacity. One trend is to have solar panels oriented toward morning or evening sun rather than midday sun, less kWh generated overall, but possibly more valuable kWh due to time of day.
If you get enough grid accessible battery capacity, during normal conditions, the price ceiling falls and the floor raises. Of course, when all the batteries are full or empty, the price can go negative again.
That's exactly what I want is for my car's battery to be drained overnight.
If you set the app to allow it to be drained overnight, then it may be drained overnight. Similar to forgetting to pump gas into the tank and getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Most people are a bit smarter than that.
What about the top 10% or 20%? It would be just like using “reserve mode” but you’d get paid for it. And have the option to turn it off before a road trip.
And have extra wear on your battery that would far outweigh anything you’d get out of it?
I’m down about 18% capacity after 4 years of owning my current EV. It’s still plenty for my needs but I would be very disappointed if I saw this capacity drop much sooner or if it drops much more.
A replacement would be ~$15k and the cost of replacing the car would be a lot greater.
I’m very much digging the current strategy of grid-tied batteries and the myriad of companies working to re-use battery packs for grid batteries.
If it's any reassurance, I think the consensus is that the rate of degradation of your battery will slow considerably once it gets past 20% (of the order of 1-2% per year, i.e. the battery will outlast the rest of the vehicle by a long way) [0].
0. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/heres-one-way-we-know-t...
If $15k gets you a pretty big LFP battery, then you can get hundreds of thousands of kWh of use under gentle conditions like V2G. There are plenty of situations where 2-5 cents of wear per kWh is very worth it.
And if you do replace that battery, and you can't get a huge discount from selling the old one, then slap on a $500 inverter and install it at your house to keep using for the next 20 years.
I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.
Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
Paid for supplying demand!
I’ll believe that when I see it.
Spot pricing in energy markets goes negative when there is too much energy in the grid. Someone gets paid to take it out.
Never the retail customer
Depends, there have been cases where certain cases or classes of consumers get discounts. Time based pricing was one example. Industrial and commercial rates can have these types of claw backs as well.
We have a similar law in France. Something is unclear to me though:
"build a conceptually similar, 657 kW solar carport system across 12 parking lots (shown, above) that delivers more than 1.23 million kWh of clean, emissions-free power annually and offsets the equivalent of 185,000 vehicles’ worth of harmful carbon emissions."
Not sure what that means but that doesn't seem right.
The complete sentence for context:
"Here in the US, we’re proving that out, too – the Northwest Fire District in Arizona partnered with Standard Solar to build a conceptually similar, 657 kW solar carport system across 12 parking lots (shown, above) that delivers more than 1.23 million kWh of clean, emissions-free power annually and offsets the equivalent of 185,000 vehicles’ worth of harmful carbon emissions."
I have to wonder if they are taking into account the AC usage or other factors to get there; When you park in the shade, you don't have to cool your car down nearly as much. This effect is greater in hot deserts with lots of sun. There are likely other benefits to the vehicles and infrastructure.
Which part?
12 parking lots
657 kW nameplate capacity
1.23 GWh per year of energy production
The 185,000 cubicles worth of CO2 emissions is likely based on average pollution per car, and average carbon intensity of the local grid.
The average emissions for a car is 4.6 tons of co2. The average carbon intensity of U.S. electricity generation is around 384 grams of co2 per kWh. 1230000 * 0.384 / 1000 = 472 tons. But 185000 cars emit 851000 tons so 500 tons is like a rounding error, unless I am mistaken.
Yeah the longer I look at it the less their numbers make sense.
I also did a double take, “surely it’s not 4.6 tonnes per year”. But it is.
If that came out as a liquid rather than a gas, we’d have stopped burning fossil fuels by now.
Either it’s a full on hallucination or they intend the power to be used to charge electric vehicles. Which is a stretch because solar parking isn’t going to sell that many electric vehicles. It will sell some, but not that many more.
1.23GWh is enough to power a few hundred cars, not 185 thousand.
I wish the IRA infrastructure bill from a few years ago had included something like this. Not the total mandate, but these should be subsidized and encouraged. These installations actually improve an area and have multiple benefits. Instead the US bill incentivizes detroying large swaths of wild land which is unfortunate.
Their new law requires parking lots with more than 80 spaces to have solar panels.
Great idea, where I live I'm pretty much maxing out the percentage of permitted structures allowed by zoning.
I could imagine that if solar panel carports didn't count towards structure limits, I'd build a carport across my absurdly large driveway :)
I think there are lots of "free" ways we could incentivize private construction of solar panels -- even without monetary subsidies.
Or we could even tax people for not doing it. In Denmark your land is taxed based on what it's zoned for, and how it could be utilized (not how it is utilized).
I hope this doesn't result in new parking lots to "coincidentally" only have 79 parking lots.
Some of us wouldn’t minds so much. That puts a cap on how car focused commercial real estate can be.
Depends on country, some have fixed ratios based on occupancy or square footage of shopping area. Which they could shrink, but it would raise the final price per square foot (land price stays the same and most construction costs don’t get that much smaller if you shave off a few hundred sqft).
I think I would like it if it better if it were an either or.
Either solar panels, or rain gardens, or permeable pavement, or canopy, or some combination.
But then again that might make loopholes that make my head spin. Might have to leave the higher rung up to organizations like LEED and leave the minimums as one or maybe two choices. Maybe make the other harder than solar unless you have a weird situation where say adding trees is simpler than running power distribution, like across the street from the shop.
A quick reminder that South Korea is closer to the equator than Spain or Greece.
It doesn’t matter. I’m in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton and my rooftop solar makes $1000 of power a year. Solar is so cheap now, and still falling, it makes sense literally everywhere.
Why aren't new developments including rooftop solar as a standard selling feature? If it makes sense it should be a no brainer right? Your new $800,000 home comes with a solar installation so you never pay for heating, cooling, power supply.
New homes should be built with
1) EV chargers or 240V outlets in the garage
2) Heat pump water heater
3) Heat pump for HVAC
4) Induction stove
5) Solar panels, better yet, solar roofs
6) Main panel that supports V2X (vehicle to home, to grid)
7) Ethernet cabling throughout, we can make most devices PoE, also enable smart home
This can eliminate $ 1,000+ energy bills, which are now split between gas bills for two cars, natural gas for the water heater, heating, and cooking.
Sounds a lot like actual building requirements in the Netherlands, except 6 and 7, because the city hall hates cars and doesn't care much about IOT
This is definitely nitpicky, but a better translation (imo) for "gemeente" is municipality. You're spot on otherwise. Tbf though, in much of the Randstad, a car is not a requirement for a good life and if the new residential developments are properly equipped with good OV connections, then we should use that space for parking to instead build more homes.
Since moving from the US to (rural) Limburg, I've been shocked how much less I need to drive. My partner still drives to work every day, but even then, they will come home and then walk to the supermarket instead of stopping with the car.
Labor and permitting costs.
Those are already a large part in housing costs, and rooftop solar panels? That's both roofing work and installation of advanced electric equipment. And the market doesn't seem to have that many people who base their buying decisions on whether the house has solar panels installed.
Labor costs are going to stick around until we get humanoid robots to work well. But the permitting situation could sure benefit from a lot of regulation being purged.
I believe this is due in the UK (from 2027) which is quite far north from the equator: new homes need a certain percentage of the roof covered in solar cells.
It won't be enough to be self sufficient but it does offset a bit I guess
My London-based solar panels make us (net) self sufficient across the year.
They produce about 3,800kWh every year - which is bang on the average home electrical consumption.
Even in winter they offset our bills by a decent amount.
You have a big peek in early summer/late spring and a nosedive during winter. Still need generation capacity for winter.
And South Korea is at about the same latitude as Tennessee and North Carolina.
I will never stop to amaze me how far to the south the USA is compared to Europe on average. I live near Berlin and even most Canadians live further to the south than me.
Europe is uniquely hot for how far North it is. It's due to Gulf Stream and we might lose it at some point as the climate change progresses.
The West coast is much more similar though. Paris is at a latitude between Seattle and Vancouver while San Francisco is a little south of Lisbon. Both have pretty comparable climates.
In contrast, it will never amaze me how far north Europe is. Canada weather is cold and yet y'all live even further north!
Gulf Stream.
AMOC collapse will be brutal.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...>
That is generally worse for PV potential, clouds, rain etc
Being further north does have some advantages. If the panels are angled more to get a better view of the sun they will also be better at shedding snow loads.
There was a recent discussion here on vertical panels. The data was better than I’d have guessed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414215
The amount of power you get from panels in winter is pathetically low with or without snow.
It floors me that the whole world is pretty content saying “okay cool solar/wind/renewables” and then theres the uneducated states of america who is rejecting all of it
This is performative. If it were economically viable there'd be panels in parking lots. They're not because the land isn't the expensive part. It's the installation, maintenance, and ancillary equipment that makes solar expensive these days.
If you look at it as a way of disincentivizing wasting land on parking lots, it makes a lot of sense
It's probably not going to do that either. The number of spaces per lot will move to below the limit and more lots will be created to make up the difference. The net will likely be less efficient utilization of lots leading to more overall land usage
Sometimes we do things that the market has failed to price properly because there is still value not captured in the economics. That is not performance, that is internalizing unpriced externalities. The free market, perfect information, and perfect prices do not exist.
France has similar legislation.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/11/18/france-publishes-new-...
Yes, because the fossil fuel and energy markets are famously free of political/economic manipulation, and military and ideological intervention .. by both state and private actors.
Urban planning, too.
I wish it was a matter of education. Unfortunately that has little to do with the problem.
Don't worry, the US is actively trying to export that rejection, too, so it won't be alone. See Trump's messed up rant at the UN, and the policies and proposals of his conservative allies here in Canada.
Alberta was the the fastest growing renewable producer in Canada due to high winds and long solar days and low cloud cover. The provincial government in the pocket of the oil industry banned renewable developments for months under the excuse that it was "destroying farmland" and then came back months later with a policy that hamstringed future development.
to these people, renewables are a threat because they can't be a parasite off it.
The astonishing thing to me is that the production of solar panels is a huge source of mining and manufacturing jobs. Just like heat pumps. If we were serious about the objectives stated by the conservatives, Canada could easily be a world leader with Alberta and Saskatchewan profiting handsomely.
Very unlikely to be able to compete with China at scale however - especially since China is already at huge scale.
As always, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And if we take Conservative talking points in good faith, proctective trade policies buttress the economy in the long term. Right?
But I think you're wrong about the extractive side -- Canada has huge rare earth reserves, and while tapping into them does require an investment of time and effort, there's no reason we couldn't compete with China there.
And don't even get me started on how unattractive Canadian oil is on the international market. The same "can't compete with China" flavor of argument should apply just as well there if it makes any real sense.
Rare earths aren’t required for cheap solar.
Massive silicon crystal growth factories are. And they are a major capital investment. A capital investment China did almost a decade ago at large scale.
> the uneducated states of america
It's really not cool to insult people, you know. This is in just as poor taste as when smug Americans say "Europoors".
As an American, we deserve the derision. Please, continue shaming us, maybe some day people will get sick enough of it to try to prove them wrong.
That's probably asking too much, though.
As an American who usually gets mistaken for a Canadian while traveling, I know that some of us know they aren’t talking about us, but also that the people who they are talking about aren’t even in the conversation.
It’s effectively talking about people behind their back which is not that useful.
When I say "the uneducated states" I'm referring to general trends:
- lack of technological fluency
- lack of mathematical/scientific fluency
- lack of financial fluency
- lack of political fluency
- lack of critical thinking skills
- willful engagement with streaming psy-op platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Tiktok
Netflix a wild one to include in that list, imo. What makes you think it's on the same level? If you're making some reference to "cultural importance" I would wager that ABC/CBS in the 90s had just as strong a pull as Netflix does today culturally.
Agreed. And one of those six maybe applies to me. So I don’t sweat it, unless someone is being very broad and loud with the finger pointing.
The right wing nut jobs are most definitely in the conversation here.
> "Europoors"
A term I don't think I've ever heard. Insulting America, on the other hand, is by orders of magnitude the favorite sport of the Internet.
You aren't here often, then? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
OP here. I am American. We are the Uneducated fucking States.