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One Power(ful) Way To Improve Down Town's Parking Lots

3K views 5 replies 6 participants last post by  tamparican 
#1 ·
Something functional that could greatly benefit the appearance and green experience for our ugly urban parking lots where buildings once stood...Maas Brothers..cough, cough. Instead of just cooking in the Florida sun, let's turn those parking lots into a source of power.



Innovative Eco-Friendly Rotating Solar Car-Shelters
Link: http://bit.ly/Vmehs3

Generate Power and Money While Protecting Your Car from Harmful Sunlight
In the United States, we have paved over 160 billion square feet of land simply to have a place to park our cars… Recognizing this disparaging fact California-based Envision, Inc has created what they are calling the Solar Tree, a cost effective rotating structure that shelters cars and creates electricity via roof mounted solar panels.
Providing protection for six cars, the Solar Tree can also create enough power to charge six EV’s each day. Later this year, Envision plans on building 2,300 trees in South Carolina that are projected to be able to generate 35 megawatts of electricity.

Founded in 2006 by architect Robert Noble, Envision is a San Diego based business that offers a variety of solar technologies. The Solar Tree stands as their flagship product, and is touted as a innovative way to generate electricity while improving the aesthetics of a parking lot. Each Solar Tree can accommodate six cars, and can rotate in order to capture the maximum amount of sunlight. The tracking system is guided by their proprietary EnvisionTrak, and energy is stored in Axion batteries.

The company specializes in installing “solar groves”, or large scale forests consisting of their Solar Trees. Later this year, the company hopes to begin a project in an undisclosed location in South Carolina in collaboration with Horizon Energy Group where they will install 2,300 hundred trees to generate an impressive 35 megawatts of electricity.

“This is a massive and exciting deployment of our products,” said Desmond Wheatley, CEO of Envision Solar. “We are thrilled to be working with Horizon on this installation which is ideally suited to our highly engineered Solar Trees. Now we really get to see the value of bringing a modular and scalable product to market. Our Drag and Drop capabilities make it possible for us to deliver the very high quality that Horizon demands in a highly efficient and scalable manner keeping costs in check but never at the expense of quality. This will be by far our biggest deployment to date and we are ready for it.”

 
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#4 ·
I agree with Jasonhouse. Something like that is expensive to put up and therefore they will not want to tear it back down to build on that land, but I always thought that with us being the "sunshine state" we sure don't utilize it for power. And I think using the rooftops downtown would be a good idea and integrating it into other structures would be great. For instance you could build a similar structure for on street parking and the panels could provide shade for pedestrians on the sidewalk.
 
#6 ·
It's an excellent idea that can serve multiple purposes, like stated above to provide energy or power electric vehicles as well as shade for pedestrians. However, the parking lots I also believe would probably not be the best location, just for the sheer uncertainty and costs of building,tearing it down. Yet this could work very well in other areas that would serve a more permanent solution..
 
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