shitposts_over_9000 t1_ivoaf11 wrote
Reply to comment by Rokmonkey_ in In France all new large parking lots must now be covered in solar panels starting in july 2023. by BuildingBabel
Parking lots where I am are about $3 per square foot.
Solar cells are about $9 per square foot.
You are quadrupling the price before you even get into having to add the frames to elevate them above the 14' minimum clearance, bury all the additional cabling and infrastructure or deal with all the additional permitting and regulatory compliance not to mention liability of you previously open lot now being a code compliant structure.
After that you also have all the headache of actually plugging the cells into something productive.
Industrial power like you would find in a large grocery store makes it nearly impossible to simply backfeed like you would residential solar so you would either need an independent system that used it for something like charging batteries that can later be used for something or a second utility service specifically for the solar to dump it's excess. If you go the second route and you have a decent sized parking lot that is going to require a dedicated run to a substation in some cases because the local distribution lines aren't sized for that kind of local load.
If the cells are doing something productive they will also require maintenance far more than a parking lot that you can safely ignore for a decade or two at a time.
It will also make things in property management like snow removal far more time consuming and risky so therefore more expensive as well while adding additional pest control requirements for all the critters that will try and get into these structures and providing far more surface area for your vandalism cleanup folks to deal with.
All of these costs will be passed directly to shoppers and anyone using the utility.
hvdzasaur t1_ivpmoea wrote
I mean, France is pushing efforts to de-car it's urban centers. Having all this additional cost discourages the construction of new parking lots (which this applies to), and thus discourages vehicle traffic. It also helps prepare for the EU ban on ICE vehicles in 2035.
shitposts_over_9000 t1_ivpro34 wrote
Which if they were only applying this law to metros above a certain level of population density would make sense, but this just applies the cost to the bottom end of the supply chain across the nation and allows it to multiply as it flows up.
France has nationwide population density similar to the US midwest, the car bans only make sense in about 9% of the country, for the remaining 92% this is just added cost for near zero benefit.
hvdzasaur t1_ivqfey4 wrote
>France has nationwide population density similar to the US midwest
Not at all. France has about a population density of 117.7 people per sqkm or 304.8 per square mile. the US midwest supposedly has 90 people per sqmile, which is approx 34.7 per square km. France is more than 3 times as densely populated. Not only that, 44% of the country lives in the 20 largest metro areas. How is that in any way similar?
Did you confuse miles and km when looking up the numbers? r/confidentlyincorrect
BackgroundAccess3 t1_ivpu28r wrote
seeing as big parking lots are a big subsidy for car usage, maybe it's good if they cost more to build to reflect their environmental costs...
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