In 2021, President Joe Biden set an formidable local weather aim for the US to achieve net-zero carbon emissions economy-wide by 2050. And as a part of the transition to renewable vitality, 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 simplest 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 — became photo voltaic farms. Many native residents and conservationists have protested these rural photo voltaic tasks for a wide range of causes: Some wish to preserve pure views; others wish to retain house for agriculture or goal to protect biodiversity. Photo voltaic will probably play an essential position within the nation’s transfer away from fossil fuels, however is there a wiser technique 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 heaps. Photo voltaic photovoltaics researcher and professor Joshua Pearce goes into the information on how putting photo voltaic canopies over parking heaps could possibly be a worthwhile funding for a lot of cities. And as extra nations, like France, are transferring towards retrofitting parking areas with photo voltaic, we take a look at what it might imply within the US.

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