This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Start putting solar canopies over all these goddamn mostly empty parking lots we have everywhere. Completely wasted space otherwise and it’d provide some cover from the rain for people coming and going from their cars.
Plus you'd lower the temperature of the vehicles, reducing air conditioning and decreasing fuel/battery use, which would further decrease emissions
Or abandon the min parking reqs so developers can build something else there. But also solar panels where we actually need parking space
Yeah, build something other than a parking lot, and put a solar panel on top of that! 🧠
Most of those minimum parking requirements are based on bullshit anyways.
This seems to largely be a "retelling" of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.
This is harder than it looks.
See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.
What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.
As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.
There are plenty of crops that have to be tended and harvested by hand: Most green leafy vegetables for example.
This opens those fields to dual use alongside power generation, which might reduce agricultural use of fossil fuels, and provide shade for field workers which is especially dangerous with climate change raising heat levels.
What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots.
Most of those parking lots shouldn't exist in the first place. They should be turned into actually-useful space by putting dense, walkable buildings on them, then the solar panels should go on top of that.
Often times, the only option for smaller communities that are car dependent is just a multi-level garage that has a smaller footprint. But many don't have the demand for downtown commercial real estate that would help it make financial sense.
So we need levitating solar panels. Got it.
Agro-solar is a win win. Solar is the fastest and the most economic energy to deploy.
Agrivoltaics is the combined use of solar panels and agriculture under the panels that together use less energy and produce more crops. It can also provide shade for livestock.
I guess it would depend on the crops, but wouldn't it somewhat limit the use of farming equipment. I assume you're not going to fit a tractor in the field with those panels and supports.
It depends on the type of supporting structure for the panels. In Germany a company built it tall enough to use their normal farm equipment: Image
I've seen pictures of massive tractors pulling several ploughs side by side in the US, that would most likely not work with this, but there are plenty of solutions for anything on a slightly smaller scale.
The original story from NPR says that they're able to drive their tractor between the panels. It's interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that's how they're making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they're required to do for historic reasons.
It's usually permanent pasture grazing that's mixed with solar panels. Take low value land that doesn't support the use of large equipment, add value with panels and get free shade for livestock.
There's lots of startups making smaller agile AI powered electric robotics for agriculture. Would pair well with a farm like this.
As this is not mentioned, is it possible to extend the system by collecting rainwater falling on solar panels ?
The rainwater would fall off the slanted panels and fall onto the plants.
What is you installed a gutter? And made the down pipe go into a bucket
Sure you could do that, but... why?
To more evenly distribute the collected rainfall rather than to water just the plants sitting under the edge of each solar row? Or to use the rainfall for other farmy things?
the water should distribute itself evenly enough on most soils, but yes you could retrofit it with some distribution system.
This is so cool!
