Low voltage DC collection distributed over hundreds of km - sounds brilliant.
Really- it’s a good idea with some real design and maintenance challenges. It also costs a great deal of money to implement. Covering unused land en mass is more cost effective, but still not enough to put everywhere. And just covering the water with a reflective surface would be cheaper, but still more expensive than losing the water to the atmosphere (so far).
It looks to me like a completely unnecessary solution. Covering up the water is a good idea, but find an immediate and cost affective way to do it. Loads of custom ineffectively laid out solar panels is not that.
It’s not as though we have a surplus of solar panels that need a place to go. If the money is being invested, place them in a location with them oriented toward the sun and not above water.
yeah fill up flat-roof buildings first - before even thinking about any of these wacko things.
it’s nearest to electricity demand so less distribution losses.
and access for maintenance is probably already there.I’m absolutely down for solar covered parking lots though. Shaded parking + power.
meh, #fuckCars… let them burn. I’d rather see solar covered cycling paths keeping cyclists dry. And solar covered bus/tram/train stop shelters, which could power the ETA display.
Much like the OP, doing solar in long strips like you would have to for cycling path presents some issues when it comes to the supporting electrical equipment, a square parking lot is a lot more condusive to it. As for tram stations, sure you could easily enough power it with panels but to be feeding into the grid with such a small amount of panels/station is probably not going to be cost effective (again) when it comes to the supporting equipment, especially when it’s right next to limitless power from the train lines.
There are no parking spots in a solarpunk future because cars are illegal
Unless you’re talking about bike parking. Yeah, let’s cover the bike shelters with solar panels! We can use them to power the ebike chargers
K, meanwhile in the real world…
Also, I refuse to live in a city center which means when I go somewhere it’s via personal car or motorcycle.
Why not train or bicycle? Those are sensible ways to travel. And you don’t need to live in a city center to walk places, that’s what medium density neighbourhoods are for.
I mean, the alternative is destroying the planet with carbon emissions
I prefer living in the sticks. And that’s not the alternative. Carbon neutral synthetic gasoline is literally a thing and Porsche is producing it for their F1 team (for testing). IIRC the product was fully functional at this point but just needed some process improvements to decrease the cost, I don’t remember what the cost per gallon was but I remember it being a lot lower than I expected even without the benefits of economies of scale. I personally think that’d be a much better route to go than battery electric with the amount of rere, exotic, or toxic materials needed for that, plus charge times, plus the certain applications where that doesn’t work well at all (Semis and motorcycles being two off the top of my head).
Cars are bad for community, dangerous, elevate the risks of drugs, create PM2.5 pollution, are loud and disrupt healthy sleep, are not accessible for disabled people, make it harder to raise children, and just suck.
Yeah just makes sense, they just need some way to funnel rain water into them too still.
That itself is not hard either.
Dams too, rather then those little black balls ontop of the water a large solar array could help stop evaporation while still letting water collection happen
There are solar installations on quite a few dams around the world. It just makes a lot of sense. It keeps the panels cooler, which means they are more efficient, and the damns usually have turbines which means easy tie in with existing electrical grid.
