Solar Grove

For my undergraduate thesis, I studied ways in which we can reverse the damage from our suburbs by retrofitting what is currently in existence. One major issue that needed to be addressed was that of the enormous parking lots and wasted space. I'll have to get back to this post with the specific percentage, but a vast majority of land in our cities is paved. It's an impervious surface that caters to the automobile, and not the person. Not only are our suburbs already flooded in parking, but zoning codes actually demand that new commercial architecture has enough parking. You may ask, how do they determine enough? Well, enough is the space needed to provided parking for one particular day of the year: Black Friday. What about the other 364 days? That space is wasted; it creates storm water runoff that flows into our already polluted waterways, and it adds to the urban heat island effect- increasing the temperatures of the- already warming- surrounding areas.

Ideally, those parking lots would disappear as people depended more and more on their own two feet to transport them; as the goods needed for every day life soon became available within walking distance and the empty parking lots would be returned to wild land. In a perfect world.... Well my thesis always addressed the, "what can be done about it NOW?" question. Here and now, those wasteful parking lots could serve better purposes than car parking. They could be transformed into a farmers market, as many are on weekdays. An even better use: harvest energy.

The Solar Grove concept, described in Jim Motavalli's Mother Nature Network article, was a terrific invention. Why not take advantage of these wide open spaces and harness some solar energy while we park in the shade! We all know (at least those of us who have ever driven on a warmer day) that the shaded spots go quickly. The solar trees that are used in parking lots to support photovoltaic panels also provide enough energy to charge electric cars. Solar groves have been around for a little while now- at least since 2009, when I first studied them for my thesis. Below is a precedent image selection I had saved on my computer, unfortunately, I can't recall what each image is of or from.

If we're going to keep the private automobile in use for now- it's a good thing we're finding ways to make it cleaner. Still, it will never be enough; we can not continue our relationship with the automobile forever.