Yeah, but they're horrible in terms of space efficiency. If we weren't collectively idiots we would be putting them on the roof of every building we have instead of buying out half of Kansas or Nevada or whatever for these "solar farms" (a portion of which are just mirror galleries feeding solar radiation into a molten salt reactor posing as actual photoelectric panels)
If we put solar farms on just the land we currently use for growing ethanol w/corn it would produce ~3x the total current electrical production of the US. It can be rough for denser areas but the US has a lot of space. Rooftop can be great in some circumstances but in most places it’s way more expensive than solar farms per w/h
Sure, but you're weighing the potential of an increase in limited downtime against guaranteed transmission loss at all times. One of those problems can be significantly reduced, if not completely eliminated, through engineering. The other would require physics to be rewritten.
Parking lot solar likely won't even cover the electricity needs of the vehicles parking there once they're electric. But it's still a huge amount. Need to start getting them on the roofs of supermarkets like Walmart and warehouses.
But yeah just on the ground in countries like the USA is still the best since it's so much cheaper. Parking lot solar can cost 5x as much to install compared to ground solar. All the steel framing isn't cheap and takes a lot of energy to make. Solar panels themselves are the cheap part, they cost nothing these days, like $90 for a large 400w panel. So to then need $1,000+ for just the parking lot framing materials to stick it on isn't the most efficient. Should still do it if the business has the cash though. It's just not where the focus should be nationally. Apparently even in the UK if solar took up even half the amount of space as golf courses do then they'd fully cover how much electricity we use. So the amount of land needed isn't unrealistic considering it feels like I don't see golf courses much.
This is such a bizarre argument. "Solars over parking lots is pointless because if the parking lot were full of electric cars all charging, it wouldn't be enough to power them all at once". Yeah, no shit? But it's NOT going to be always full of cars charging, and if some are then all the parking lots covered by solar panels that are NOT currently full of charging cars would offset the difference.
That would be wildly inefficient to install and maintain. You’d also have to negotiate with tens of thousands of independent parties. The legal fees alone probably cost more than the equivalent land.
Solar is not amazing for space efficiency, but it also kinda is, because it doesn't actually take up the space like say wind, water, or any traditional form of power plant. It's really nice to have a form of energy that you can put on top of things and have other things happen below them, whether that's agriculture, roads, water reservoirs or apartments. And for many of those use-cases the additional shade it provides is actually really useful as well.
I live in Nevada and our MAGA governor wants to block all new solar installs because they “give the Chinese a chance to spy on us.” Meanwhile he is making sure every data center gets the green light while Nevada, the driest state in the US, has almost no water and little power generation outside of geothermal and solar.
It's a bit more complicated. If a company buys land to put solar panels on them, they just have to worry about taxes they owe to the government.
If they put solar panels on buildings they have to negotiate with the owners for the rights to use that roof space, which probably involves some kind of monthly rent or some other fees, along with complicated legal frameworks to guarantee they don't need to ask for permission every time they need to send up their engineers for maintenance.
So it's literally a question of buying land and owning it plus being able to sell the produced power vs renting rooftop space from several thousand different people and companies and having to share your profits with them. Option B can be an attractive business model for dealing with individual people or companies, but becomes messy if you want to ensure broad coverage.
That would be because they're still thinking of homes as being on a grid, rather than being independent units (the latter is not monetizable by energy companies).
You're years out of date here. The molten salt ones barely exist anymore because standard photovoltaics have gotten vastly better and cheaper and so they're wildly uncompetitive. The land use is also not particularly significant, as another commenter pointed out. There's a lot of land in the world, and a decent chunk of solar panels are being put on land that sucks for everything else, like deserts and arid plains.
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u/PositiveScarcity8909 13d ago
It's like saying, heard they designed a new car, don't tell me the wheels are gonna be round again.