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.”
I read the original comment by ACCount37 in the same way Forbo and BolexNOLA did - that ACCount37 is fine with cooling towers or dams, but not with coal stacks. This is a fully reasonable interpretation, considering the comment they were responding to explicitly listed those 3 examples; had they not been so explicit, it might be more reasonable to interpret it as simply not having an opinion on items not listed, but that isn't the case.
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.
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.
No I'm 100% in factor of lots of new build nuclear. It's only expensive because it's rare. The more we build the cheaper it becomes. And it does not have the issues like wind and solar and even gas.
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.
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.