Imagine electricity from solar PV installations without occupying any roof or land. Wouldn’t it be awesome? Yes, they are more expensive than any regular rooftop or ground-mounted PV projects but they’re worth a shot.
Rooftops are great place to install solar. Ground mounted solar PV have their own advantages, but they take huge tracts of your valuables (both in term of price and use) land for good. Now, while the prices of solar panels dropping and which is likely to continue falling steadily, the question is what are other places where these panels can be installed?
Solar Carport / Parking Canopy is one of the most favorable places of our customer who have no to typical rooftop structure. Solar Streetlights, buses and trains also started installing solar on their roof to reduce the load on grid and to become pollution free. Solar array on canals, highways add to the list for no use of extra land.
You will be amazed to know about a new highway in South Korea that runs between Daejon to Sejong and also contains a bicycle lane. The entire cycle lane, which is in middle of highway with a stretch of 32 km, is covered with solar panels. Let discuss the advantage of this innovative in civil engineering. With this solar covered bicycle path, cyclists are protected from the burning sun, isolated from traffic, and the country is enjoying clean energy.
The Daejon-Sejong solar covered bike path is not the first solar road, although it is the most ambitious, we have seen to date.
Another similar solution is to cover canals with solar panels. It will save land, water, and carbon emissions in one. It is just like hitting many targets with one stone. A 100 MW canal-top solar power generation project on the top the branch canals of river Narmada in Gujrat, India is one of its kind. Solar panels on canals provide electricity without occupying any additional land whereas reduced evaporation is a plus.
Scholars at the University of California Santa Cruz, found that these projects (Solar on canals) could be developed in the U.S. easily. California, with its largest water conveyance system, more importantly which is constantly threatened by droughts can be utilized for the purpose of installing solar.
Electricity produced by this panels on such imaginable spaces can be a part of a national economic recovery plan. With their efficiency of providing shade to whoever runs beneath without using any extra land for the purpose, it looks likely that these snaking, glittering solar canals and solar highways will become a much more common sight through the globe in the coming years.
