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In 2021, President Joe Biden set an formidable local weather objective for the US to succeed in net-zero carbon emissions economy-wide by 2050. And as a part of the transition to renewable power, the nation has drastically ramped up manufacturing of photo voltaic over the previous few years. However that’s led to a brand new downside: discovering sufficient land on which to place photo voltaic panels.
The best and least expensive locations to put in photo voltaic panels are sometimes massive, undeveloped plots of land. It’s why, in lots of locations throughout the nation, we’ve seen rural areas — together with fragile desert ecosystems and beneficial farmland — was photo voltaic farms. Many native residents and conservationists have protested these rural photo voltaic initiatives for a wide range of causes: Some need to hold pure views; others need to retain house for agriculture or goal to protect biodiversity. Photo voltaic will probably play an necessary function within the nation’s transfer away from fossil fuels, however is there a wiser strategy to do it that doesn’t require taking on a lot rural land?
Within the video above, we discover one possibility that might assist: parking tons. Photo voltaic photovoltaics researcher and professor Joshua Pearce goes into the info on how inserting photo voltaic canopies over parking tons might be a worthwhile funding for a lot of cities. And as extra international locations, like France, are shifting towards retrofitting parking areas with photo voltaic, we take a look at what it may imply within the US.
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