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solar panels and parking lots
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Installing and maintaining solar panels costs a lot. Perhaps the businesses found that not profitable.
In Hong Kong, we have a "install solar panels on your roof" project, and the electricity company buys the power you generate at approx. 5x market price. It sounds great at first, but people quickly realized installation and maintenance cost so much, you can only get back what you paid for after 10 years.
This may not be relevant to the discussion because we are talking about big space, and HK houses are small area-wise.
Another way to look at it: It used to be 20-25 years, so 10 is probably the best it's ever been for ROI.
It's better, but not good enough for people to consider it
Emphasis on the 5x selling price too. Imagine they buy at market price
Interesting. In switzerland if you sell your solar power to the power company you get between 0.03-0.10 francs per kw/h while electricity costs between 0.25-0.40 francs. The calculated ROI is still 10-15 years for most people though
And many Cantons offer to subsidize part of the installation. With increasing energy prices I bet those ROI are going end up better than initially projected.
Depending on the State power prices and tax incentives/rebates and your power consumption there are those that are getting 6-8 year ROI.
Isn't 10 years around the expected lifetime of a panel?
They're usually rated 20-25, but I think I read recently that some are still producing useful power after that.
Read an article on an early adopter that had over 30 year panels. They reported it was still producing around 70% of its original rated power.
That sounds like the one I'm recalling.
Solar panels are considered "end of life" when they only produce 70-80% of their rated power.
Most panels now seem to have a warranty lasting 25 years, guaranteeing that they will still be producing x% of their original capacity at that time, such as 92% or 88%. Generally a higher guaranteed percentage will cost more than a lower guaranteed percentage with the same starting output. After that time they will continue producing electricity but their output may drop faster. Someone might decide to replace them even though they’re still producing if the output seems too low.
Most batteries seem to only come with 10 year warranties, though, and DC to AC inverters might only have a 10 year warranty.
10 year payback period sounds great if you're staying there long term
That’s actually part of the point. Installing and maintaining solar panels on the roof is expensive. Installing them essentially on open ground ought to be significantly cheaper
You have to have a roof to have a building. It's a built in cost. The only extra is expensive in a buisness roof build out is more electrical wiring and panel supports. You can also generally walk between them to maintain them.
Putting panels on the roof, especially the generally flat and accessible business roofs is way easier and cheaper than building out entirely new 12ft high buildings with trenched cabling and then adding panels.
No buildings, just solar panels on poles. You don’t risk the roof or the stores business. You can use heavy equipment like trenchers. No one has to set up scaffolding or risk a potentially deadly fall.
We have huge amounts of real life evidence that solar panels on poles in an empty flat elf are far cheaper to install and maintain than solar panels on a roof, especially a business that wants to stay open.
Solar panels on poles is probably somewhere in between. It seems like they’d be much cheaper, like solar panels on poles in a field, but I don’t know if real life bears that out yet
If you're going up put them in a parking lot, they have to be up high enough that people need lifts and fall protection, and in order to actually use the parking lot you'll need some heavy duty concrete supports, not just "poles". And that's before you even get into the cost of the electrical infrastructure. All the conduit will need to be buried, which means ripping up the parking lot and then repaving it, new subpanels and inverters, new meter, god knows what regulatory requirements...
You clearly have no experience or research into this matter so please stop assuming that you've figured it all out. It's not as simple as all that.