Solar panels in parking lots make so much sense. Why don’t we do this in the US?

9 comments

1. $$$

2. The real answer: it’s cheaper to mount them elsewhere. Mounting hardware is more expensive than the panels themselves, and it’s a race to the bottom on costs. And this is an extraordinarily expensive way to do this unless you already are planning to do covered parking. Few people would pay extra for covered transitory parking, so there’s not an economic incentive to do this vs. having an open lot. Putting it on the roof of the supermarket would be cheaper. And putting them in an unused field (or increasingly in farm fields around crops) is even cheaper.

   Also, the parking lot needs to be oriented in the right direction too and ripping up a parking lot to fix that is expensive and wasteful.

   Edit: I wonder how viable paving the lot itself with solar panels would be…would probably be more efficient than using this method!!

3. California has solar panels in parking lots everywhere; Walmarts, College campuses, schools, bus depots, business parks, etc.

4. Because in the name of profits they would rather destroy natural habitat and farmland instead of doing something like this that actually makes logical sense.

5. Many parking lots aroud here get a lot of shade from buildings. There are park and rides with open sky. They would also need a sub station to distribute the electricity. It could be used locally for EV’s.

6. Seeing more and more of this happening in Colorado.

7. I totally agree. Eversource on Summer Street in Plymouth MA has solar panels over the parking lot for the service trucks.

   They save lots of time and money when it snows. This can significantly decrease the payback time for the solar panels if we get a bad snow season.

8. We do in California.

9. US starts building new nuclear power plants instead. Much better for all the ai data centers. Idiocracy is getting real.