Solar groves power parking lots and keep the rain off our heads

May 22, 2008   by Jozef Winter

Imagine a parking lot that wasn’t radiating heat to your body on a hot summer’s day, or one that didn’t suck up kilowatts of electricity while being lit overnight. Now imagine one that was covered in solar panels, supported above your head by solar trees, providing shelter from the rain, but allowing light to pass through, all the while producing clean, renewable electricity.

Well the folks at Envision are, as they put it “transforming parking lots into power plants”. Their solar grove (more pictures after the jump), a veritable forest of single-pole mounted solar panel roofs, provides canopy covers for 8 vehicles per “tree”, with each standard grove having a peak production of 235KW! That’s a lot of clean energy going back into the grid, but the system is not only designed to be aesthetically pleasing and power producing, it also provides other environmental benefits.

Each tree canopy is tilted, every so slightly, to allow for water drainage to be led towards organic filters, which clean out parking lot run off. While the canopies are lit at night, at least under them, their roofs shield the night sky from light pollution which is abundant in conventional parking lot lights, a major annoyance to birds, insects and astronomers alike. Finally, and welcomely, since the systems prevent the sun from reaching the asphalt below, it is minimally warmed and therefore less prone to expansion damage and more importantly, reduces the heat-island effect ever present in our cities.

For more pictures, visit their gallery.

via Metaefficient