Solar Groves  

This is a great idea (especially down here where car parks are excruciatingly hot in summer) - a car park that doubles as a solar farm, with the solar panels providing the added benefit of shading the cars.

One reader comments that it would be even better if a way of harvesting rain water falling on the lot could be implemented as well, which is a good idea too.

Kyocera recently installed its first public "Solar Grove" consisting of 25 "solar trees" that converts a 186-vehicle parking lot into a 235 kW solar electric generating system. The system's 25 solar trees form a carport in a Kyocera employee parking lot, utilizing a total of 1,400 Kyocera KC-187G solar photovoltaic (PV) modules and 200 custom-manufactured, light-filtering PV modules.

The standard Kyocera solar modules used in the Solar Grove are
covered by a 25-year manufacturer’s warranty, and Kyocera anticipates
that the Solar Grove will pay for itself within 12 years.

WorldChanging notes that this would be a good application for the new wave of plastic solar collectors.

Set aside for a moment the cost of the project and the fact that it got a 36% kickback from the state of California. As the price of solar comes down -- and cheap plastic solar comes onto the market -- we're going to see lots more of this. The solar energy hitting the ground on parking lots (and on roofs and roads and sidewalks and...) is wasted, for the most part. Last year, the American Geophysical Union estimated that the total built-up surfaces in the United States amounted to 112,610 square kilometers (an area bigger than the state of Ohio). If just one-tenth of one percent of that surface area -- 113 square kilometers (or 113,000,000 square meters) -- had 5% efficient plastic solar coverage, we'd be looking at a total energy generation potential of over 5.6 gigawatts. Not quite enough to power the whole country, but a pretty good start nonetheless.

WorldChanging also has a post on the use of solar power (and possibly wind power) for a new station in Antarctica.

The Halley VI station in Antarctica (we noted the winning design just a couple of weeks ago) will be the first Halley station to make use of renewable energy. From the outset, Halley VI will make use of a solar thermal system for heating water, taking advantage of the 24-hour sunlight of the Antarctic summer; as the modular station grows, the design allows for the introduction of solar photovoltaic and wind power. Electricity generation is augmented by a special ultra-cold-weather diesel generator -- sorry, biodiesel fans, the South Pole's just too cold for anything other than a special aviation formulation of petrodiesel.