New French law will blanket parking lots with solar panels

French parking lots could soon generate as much electricity as 10 nuclear power plants

Washington Post

Michael Birnbaum, The Washington Post

A construction worker inspects solar panels in Laudun L’Ardoise, France. PHOTO BY JEREMY SUYKER/BLOOMBERG FILES

The plan makes France a world leader in efforts to cover as many surfaces as possible with solar panels, a step advocates say will be crucial in broader plans to phase out fossil fuels in the coming years. The expansion could add as much as eight percent to France’s current electrical capacity.

The cost of solar panels continues to drop, and they are an increasingly competitive source of energy both for individual households and bigger consumers. But one big challenge is finding enough space for them to generate electricity in bulk. That’s why policymakers have parking lots in their sights: They are big and unbeautiful, and covering them with solar panels doesn’t take away from anything else.

One challenge of increasing solar power coverage in a densely populated country like France, he said, is finding ways that don’t compete for land use, said Arnaud Schwartz, the president of France Nature Environment, an umbrella group of French environmentalist organizations. Taking away agricultural land or open fields and giving it over to solar farms is unattractive, but covering parking lots “harms biodiversity a lot less,” he said.

“We live already in parts of the world where it’s pretty dense,” he said. “Human beings are everywhere.”

The plan to require solar-panel-covered parking lots is part of a bigger piece of legislation, the Law for the Acceleration of the Production of Renewable Energy, that French President Emmanuel Macron has made a centrepiece of his climate efforts. It will require all parking lots larger than about 16,000 square feet — able to hold roughly 50 American-sized cars, and more French ones — to build raised solar-panel canopies covering at least half of the surface of the parking lot.

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“We’ve known for a while that solar energy is the least costly way of generating renewable electricity. In most cases we can outcompete fossil fuels,” said Joshua Pearce, an engineering professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, who has studied the possibility of installing solar panels on the roofs and parking lots of Walmart stores in the United States. Those alone would be able to generate about 11 gigawatts of electricity, he estimated, about the high end of the French effort.

“The beauty of a Walmart parking lot is, if you cover a Walmart roof and its parking lot, then it has more power than it needs,” he said.Backers expect that when the sun is shining, the panels ought to be able to generate enough power for the businesses served by the parking lot, and at times for the community surrounding them.

One natural use of the electricity from parking lots, advocates say, is for charging electric vehicles, a measure that would avoid the loss of electricity that occurs when it is sent over long distances.

Mounting solar canopies over parking lots — essentially making a sun shade over the parking spots out of solar panels — can be more costly than putting them on roofs or straight on the ground, since they need steel support structures to keep them in place. But backers say that they’re still cost-effective and can beat conventional energy costs.

If half of France’s parking lots are covered by solar panels, they’ll have an installed capacity of between 6.75 gigawatts and 11.25 gigawatts, at a cost of between US$8.7 billion and US$14.6 billion, according to the official analysis of the legislation. France’s 56 nuclear power plants each have a capacity of slightly over 1 gigawatt on average — and the one under construction in Flamanville has ballooned in cost to US$14 billion, according to the latest estimate — roughly the same as the entire solar expansion.t

The law also makes it easier to build solar panels alongside highways and eases restrictions on wind power.France gets more than 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, the most in the world, meaning its energy sector has unusually low emissions. But it has lagged in installing renewable energy, falling short of European Union requirements. And with demands set to increase from the electrification of cars and heating, French policymakers say they need to move quickly to boost solar and wind.“There is a paradox. Though our electricity production is one of the most carbon-free in Europe, we are still behind in the development of renewable energies. This bill intends to resolve this contradiction,” Damien Adam, a centrist member of the National Assembly who shepherded the legislation through the French legislature, told fellow lawmakers last month before they took a first vote on the law.

After the French Senate holds a final vote on Tuesday — the outcome is not in doubt — Macron will give final approvals, and it will go into effect in July. Owners of parking lots will have between three and five years to comply.