The Parking Lot as ‘Solar Grove’

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/the-parking-lot-as-solar-grove/?src=me

One day early in 2004, Robert Noble, an architect specializing in sustainable design, asked himself why parking lots in the United States weren’t covered in solar panels and used to generate clean energy. A few firms had been building carports with solar panels for some time, but none had acquired a major presence or branched out much beyond the residential market.

“Parking lots are this wasteland – they’re the last thing that gets attention,” Mr. Noble said in an interview. “Here’s a market the size of Alpha Centauri that’s never been tapped.”

In 2005, Mr. Noble founded Envision Solar, now the country’s leading developer of solar carports. The company’s signature product is “solar groves,” 1,000-square-foot canopies that shade parking lots while generating clean power from an array of photovoltaic panels.
One early adopter was the Kyocera Corporation of Japan, which tasked Envision Solar with the construction of its first large-scale “solar grove” in 2006 at its United States headquarters in San Diego, where a 235-kilowatt carport harnesses 1,400 of Kyocera’s own solar photovoltaic modules. Other major installations soon followed at Dell Computer’s headquarters in Round Rock, Tex.; at the Horsham, Pa., headquarters of Centocor, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary; and at the University of California at San Diego.

The company is now branching out into electric car generation by outfitting its solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. It has developed a pilot project with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., while also working with Coulomb Technologies, a developer of electric vehicle charging stations.

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I can see a home version and am mentally building the tool shed with a solar canopy in the plan.
Humans are so inventive. I love the idea of keeping the cars cool and the buildings run on solar power.

to beat your car's A/C so hard on your trip home.

:thumbsup:

sensor does its thing, the heating elements partially powered by sunlight and the lithium ion batteries below take over and melt it off.



I made all that up.

in snow season, in the northern latitudes, will probably make the snow fall off...