Southern California Edison blankets roofs with solar panels

[JohnWxy]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/environment/2010-04-11-rooftop-solar_N.htm

FONTANA, Calif. — The view from a warehouse roof here is consistent. In every direction, there are blocks and blocks of warehouse roofs baking in the Southern California sun. Rather than letting them sit bare, a California utility hopes to blanket roofs like these with solar panels to produce enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.
Southern California Edison has installed solar on two warehouse roofs and is working on another in the Los Angeles region. The utility expects to do 100 to 125 more, totaling about 1.5 square miles of roof space in the next five years.

The program, in which the utility owns the solar, is the largest of its kind in the nation, not surprising since California is the No. 1 solar market. But utilities in other states, including North Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey, have smaller plans to rent roofs for their own mini-solar-power plants, too.

The phenomenon, while in its infancy, presents another way for solar to spread in a bigger way than it has historically done when home and business owners put solar on roofs. The deep-pocketed utilities are planning bigger installations. Yet the systems don't consume green land or require new power-transmission links, as do some massive solar farms planned for deserts in California, Arizona and Nevada. As such, rooftop solar is likely to face fewer environmental hurdles than the farms and can get permits and be built much faster.
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The Fontana roof holds 33,700 solar panels over almost 600,000 square feet. It kicks out 2 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve 1,300 California homes. The electricity travels under a parking lot to an existing power line on the street.
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"Real estate firm AMB Property, which owns 22.4 million square feet of warehouse space in the Los Angeles region, has also rented Edison a warehouse roof."

interesting.

[tabatha]

1. Good for them!!!

That is a better way to go than ploughing up protected areas.

Hope others follow suit.

[louis-t]

2. Curious what the arrangement is. Re-roofing must be

a nightmare.

[kristopher]

3. I imagine issue of reroofing is a net plus for solar

Most of the damage suffered by roofs is a product of exposure to solar radiation. I haven't seen an analysis but it seems reasonable to speculate that the roofs under properly installed solar will not be subject to that sort of degradation.

[louis-t]

6. They might last a few more years, agreed.

Not having sunlight hit them also allows moss to grow. Mounting them directly to the roof will also cause sporadic leaks. Still a great idea.

[JohnWxy]

8. the article said they are going to use roofs (rooves?) that are rel new with 20 yr expected life.

[liberal N proud]

4. Good

I was eating lunch with my facility manager with several other engineers. Everyone was complaining about the salt from winter and how it was destroying the parking lot.

I suggested we cover the parking lot with solar panels, it would save on salt by covering the parking lot and eliminate snow removal and we could use the electricity.

She informed us that she was actually looking into that possibility.

[NNadir]

5. I was just there. The idea that Southern California is "blanketed" with solar cells is ridiculous.

As usual, the "solar will save us" crowd is totally clueless about the scale of a 2 Mega"watt" system operating a 20% of capacity utilization means.

There are dry cleaning trucking fleets in California that use that much energy before noon every day.

The net (summer) capacity of California is 64,105 MW.

The annual electrical energy generated for 2008 was 207,984,263 MWh

This suggests that California, a natural gas hellhole that is also served by some effectively redundant and often useless wind power, has a capacity utilization of around 37%.

A 2 Mega"watt" miracle - and how telling is that after more than 8 years of hearing about the solar miracle in California that this sort of thing still inspires insipid breathlessness, no less insipid than it was 8 year ago - with a capacity utilization of 100% would produce 17,532 MWh per year.

But that's not what solar's capacity utilization is, 100%; it's more like 20%, even in sunny Southern California. (It's far less in say, Massachusetts.) Thus all this wunderbar stuff, on which anti-nukes want to bet the entire atmosphere of the planet, about 3,500 MWh out of more than 200,000,000 MWh of production in the State.

Maybe it hasn't gotten through to this crowd that climate change is a serious matter, and not something off the shelf at Toys 'R Us

[cutlassmama]

7. Every little bit helps.

[Ready4Change]

9. Ding ding!

Putting solar on roofs is a two way plus. Generates electricity while reducing AC energy needs.

Further, solar put onto roofs is solar that doesn't require removing forests or shading expanses of desert environment.

[Nihil]

10. Good move.

I'm always in favour of using existing structure & brownfield sites
rather than greenfield ones (assuming that they are appropriate for
the task of course).

:toast: