Spotted this on the Cal State University at Bakersfield website: "A 1-megawatt solar panel system will provide 25 to 30 percent of CSUB's energy use as well as shade cover to 500 parking spaces by Fall 2010 in a public-private partnership between CSU and SunEdison. The power company is funding the $9.5 million project." The first photo, also courtesy of CSUB, is of a round-about being installed in front of the Icardo Center.
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I've seen a similar project in Sacramento, CA at Cal Expo and think that it is brilliant. By providing shade to parked vehicles while collecting abounding sunlight which will soon be realized as usable energy, we're using space that was previously thought of as already "in use" and finding a better use for it.
I hope that the various owners of the large swaths of parking lots continue to do projects similar to this throughout our sunshine-filled state. Be they private or public projects, these make sense to me. If this practice were to become widely adopted, many of the costs associated with the project would likely come down.
With as many mall shopping centers (with large parking lots) as they own, imagine if Westfield and GGP embarked on similar ventures: we'd be entering into a sunlight-harvesting dreamscape. The same could be said for professional sports stadiums, too.
Needless to say, I am excited to see this project come online.
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