MAY 23

"And instead of creating leaves and nuts and stuff...it creates electricity."

You forgot the best thing of all that trees produce, OXYGEN! Please lets not forget that little darling.
Besides like I said before the biggest hurdle for this is city regulations. In Austin you will spend a ton of money and time because of the landscape requirements, and that would require mega variances in the city code. and God forbid you have to comply to subchapter "E."

So far as I can tell, there is only one installation of these and it cost $3 million ($2 million after subsidies) to generate electricity worth $50,000 a year. That's a 40-year backback period. Ouch.

Fresno state has a solar parking lot. http://www.treehugger.com/file..._solar.php
Live there, seen it built. Cost a lot. 7.4 million. 1.1 Megawatt plant, provides 20% usage for campus.

Trees work well too for shading. Also provides habitat. Also removes some Carbon. I don't know how everything balances out in the end. Shading is good because its hot here in the Valley, and air conditioning is energetically expensive. Trees drop sap on cars.

Trees only capture as much carbon as is seen in their bulk where it is stored...

dunno.

investing in solar is good for solar industry.

This should be a platform for all outdoor parking lot.

Let me add that its claimed that the Fresno solar parking lot will prevent the co2 equivalent 24000 trees over its lifetime. Maybe. But somehow I doubt that the construction energy expenditures were calculated in that. Actually I'm pretty sure they weren't.

If the price of electricity keeps going the way it has for the past 7 years that 40 year payback could be reduced to 20 years easy. My electric bill has doubled several times since 2000 and I hear it will double a few more times in the near future. With no increase in usage I have gone from $85.00 maximum bill to $237 a month average.

I'm not naive enough to disregard the need for things to make financial sense, but at some point (tipping point) we must eventually figure out that we can no longer afford not to invest in ideas such as this - damn the cost.

Add some power plugs directly at the base of these "trees" and it seems a great start to providing infrastructure to power all those future plug-in cars we're all dreaming about...

They might even be able to plug some electric cars into these for recharging. It would be quite a perk at malls, shopping centers and even employees of the month.

I'm not convinced that it can pay for itself in 5 years. I mean how much does all these costs and how much electricity can it generate? These technology needs a reduction in cost in order to entice people to user them.

Thanks for the support for the concept of foresting our parking lots by planting Solar Trees(TM) from a group of informed people (great website!).

The payback for solar power is always a challenge, and is to a large extent a function of capital costs, grid electricity costs, and both federal and local incentives or rebates. The Kyocera Solar Grove had a unique set of parameters. Most of the shaded parking we work on these days has a much longer payback period. However, Solar Trees(TM) provide so many other benefits to a business that the payback for planting Solar Trees(TM) in a parking lot is not in electricity savings alone! In a retail, customer-driven environment, customer experience is a key driver for the business, and shade is an amenity that improves that experience. Frankly, I believe the visual presentation of iconic solar power also has a positive impact on customer experience. The same applies to corporate campuses where employee retention is an issue. Some businesses are going to charge a nominal amount to park in the shade ($1-$2), or will sell advertising/sponsorship of the solar trees.

Just one more clarification,the Solar Tree(TM) is an architecturally pleasing element that takes solar power off of a rooftop and integrates it into the site, increasing awareness of clean energy and adding shade as a customer amenity and a great way to reduce heat island effect. We have seen some shaded parking that is either not architecturally pleasing or does not provide effective vehicle shade....more like solar power on racks with parking beneath them. The Solar Tree(TM) is a high-design modular element engineered specifically to provide both solar power and effective vehicle shade. It even includes solar-powered night lighting to provide a beautiful way to add safety and beauty without adding light pollution to the night sky. Also, some of the panels of the Solar Tree(TM) are semi-translucent, adding the effect of sunlight through the leaves of a tree and providing daylighting beneath the canopy.

Many thanks to one of you who was particularly astute to note that all of the Solar Trees(TM) are pre-wired for future charging stations for electric vehicles. We hope to see vehicle charging stations at places where we normally leave our vehicles for periods of time (such as a shopping mall).

I am proud to work for a company that dares to envision our solar powered planet. Thanks again for challenging al of us that work in the solar business! :)

Cars are a symptom of cheap energy, cheap resources and cheap land. With cheap being history now, the car might not last much longer.

They were likely saying that about the horse 100 years ago.

At any rate, truisms like "car nor garbage is disappearing any time soon" don't serve us well and may only serve to delay the inevitable or delay the creation of a better transportation system. Stop trying to predict the future and instead, create a better one.

Agreed it's better not to give out CO2 and CO by burning fuel, what these marketting folks for the so called GREEN energy are forgetting that this is a "heat" factor to be considered in all cases. Now, the tree gives us shade, O2 and does not make it self a hot spot in contrary, when the solar pannels are exposed to sun it's accucumulating heat as well which adds to global warming, alibet it reduces buy hey the temperature in the surrounding places does increase due to the "hot zone" becuase the solar panel does get heated up!

As much of a techno- and eco-geek as I am, so far the only one on here I'm seeing speak first and foremost for the Earth is Richard Campbell. Taking the view that cars and trash are both eternal features of our cultural landscape is a fairly pessimized way of trying to achieve any kind of real sustainability. Cars have GOT to become less central to our lives, and garbage has GOT to become largely a thing of the past. ESPECIALLY in parking lots and landfills respectively. To ignore the fundamental nature of these two symptoms of an inherently unsustainable economy is to torpedo any prospects for a smooth transition to a sustainable economy. You can't have parking lots and healthy ecosystems. Ditto landfills. Real trees might be a good start, but massive investments in the sorts of technologies that assume the existence of parking lots 40 years hence are not a good look. Where's the investment in human-scale development? "" bikeable infrastructure? "" pervious pavement? "" mass transit? "" telecommuting? "" the dismantling of industrial civilization itself by any means necessary? I mean, if that's what it's going to take for cars and garbage to no longer be more taken for granted than functioning ecosystems, then so be it. No economy can last that is based on constantly accelerating encroachment of built environments into former habitat. So as cool as this technology looks to the gadget geek in me, it's still in the service of an inherently irredeemable model of inefficient personal transportation for the purposes of environmentally rapacious production and consumption. And as such, it does more to put a friendly face on both the transportation model of the facility and the work that goes on there than it does to actually reduce the throughput of resources in the economy. Nothing personal against this technology or the people behind it, but it's always behoovy to examine the overall effect something like this would actually have on our impact on nature as a culture, not JUST applaud the effort to mitigate the rate of the despoiling.

"the dismantling of industrial civilization itself by any means necessary?"

Sounds like you think the SUV owners should be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Folks like you that want to dismantle current civilization by violence if necessary are no better than folks that want to blow others up in the name of Allah.

Do anyone know any informative
"green learning centers" for
children and the novice adult
to visit and to be taught about.
I see tons of websites and numerous
articles, but somewhere to visit
like a "how to" information center with
literature, visuals and an guides to
educate and illustrate how to make the
transition.

Living in a tropical or subtropical environment means cars heating up the environment while the owner is at work or shopping so it sounds interesting to have an option collecting power with solar cells as well as giving shade to the average driver. Seeing the size of America's shopping malls with their parking area often a multiple of the building size WITHOUT trees this sounds a good idea unless future malls are several floors high and built on pillars with parking beneath to help save or re-plant trees for oxygen, cool air and shade... I only wonder how we can save air-conditioning this way since the average driver needs it only when he drives not when parking ???

To those looking *narrowly* at financial cost - You forget the massive hidden costs of fossil fuels to the taxpayer:
1) Extra Navy budget for the Persian Gulf,
2) Quantifiable health costs due to particulate and ozone pollution due to cars http://www.stateoftheair.org/2008/health-risks/
3) Cars parked under shade require less energy for air-conditioning when restarted since the interior remains cool.

Ideally, we would instantly recreate our public transportation infrastructure from... 1908 or so when many large American cities like LA had electric trams :-)
However, we have to fight the Military/Oil Industrial Complex to get any change and this is one of the practical intermediate steps to get us there quickly. This is guerilla solar which would jump start the change we need so desperately (and that Obama cannot deliver) ...an end run around the excuses used by GM that we don't have an electric car infrastructure.

Uh..is anyone questioning if there are any patents on solar carports, anywehere in this world? The technology isnt free people, licensing the technology cost's money!

WWW.IPORTZ.COM

Hello, I would really apreciate if somebody could tell me the exact total cost of building a solar parking lot. Please, with details if possible, a table or something like that. I have to do a project and I can't figure it out... Thank you so much!!