Is it economically viable (pays itself)? It looks simple, but designing a shade is no small feat.

I looked once into solar covers for EV charging spots and it would provide like 5% of energy, not worth the hassle.

For parking the convenience is definitely worth it, but economically I don't think supermarkets care that much.

Depending on which one, most of them don't have airplane warning lights. There have been extensive study, and if done right you can only light up a small number but because the lights are synchronized that is a better stay away indication than having a light one them all. (lights not synchronized is a disaster - too many lights to keep track of)

I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.

A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.

And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.

I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.

> Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.

Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.

> Noise from inverter fans

Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.

Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.

Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.

Of all the kinds of power plant, a solar farm has to be the least intrusive.

Me- it's much cheaper to have panels than it would have been to run power to my property and I put them in a place with minimal aesthetic impace.

Lots of people dislike change. Neophobia is a thing, and it's not particularly uncommon.

The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.

The only problem that I kind of understand are the huge fences surrounding the farms. Because copper thefts are a big problem for them, it is quite common to have 3m high fences all around, which is obviously more gated community like than a monoculture field. And of course, it depends on how the farm is run. Solar farms can be ecological heaven if managed properly, unless growing weeds are just killed of with round-up every few months. Everything else seems more pretended problems, like inverter fans that may just be placed in the middle and should barely be hearable from 100 meters away.

Well its not silent those panels go into MPPTs that produce noise when high amps are flowing through them to charge batteries if they don't direct export , if they direct export then there is noise from inverters to convert DC->AC

Because they are not silent. Or sometimes are not. Inverters do have quite large fans.

Maybe the guy who cleans them complains loudly, or the squeak of his 4' squeegee is annoying.

Is a solar farm being built nearby as bad as your house burning down? I didn't think the property value would change that drastically...

are the homes that were burned down by solar farms in the room with us right now?

Seeing them feels dystopian. I actually don't think that opinion is so fringe. There were lots of environmental protesters when the solar farm near us went up. The valley was rich in low shrubs and wildlife, and even some forest was leveled. A multi billion dollar energy company destroyed it to pick up their share of the free government funding while powering less than 2% of homes.

Sure, it's better than a gas refinery or some other things you could find yourself living next to. But let's not ignore what's bad about our current solutions.

All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.

There's a very specific reason (or quirk) as to why Texas leads the nation in renewable energy -- ERCOT. Basically, 90% of Texas' electric load is serviced by in-state assets, and they have very few interconnections to the rest of the grid. The electricity dispatch curve is priced on the margin, on the cost to operate the last-fired generator (natural gas), and ERCOT has moved to grow solar as a way to reduce prices.[0]

ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...

Yup, my home state of Idaho also has a shockingly green energy portfolio. All of the PNW is like that because it's on a shared grid that has been primarily powered by hydro for as long as I've been alive.

And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.

Indiana has one of the largest wind farms in the world and is so red it practically glows...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler_Ridge_Wind_Farm

We also have a ton of solar. We could be doing much better as we also have an enormous amount of coal plants.

Renewable energy is profitable

I lived in texas before & the first time I saw massive wind farms alongside oil pumps was in texas.

wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.

Their first sentence could be called into question by that, not the second. The second specifies solar.

It's lovely to see actual data swat away ideological mosquito bite sniping points.

The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist.

Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful.

Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.

> renewable subsidies

I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.

Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.

> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"

This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.

You could ask them why they grow so much dang corn then?

> 1/3 of corn is used for fuel - https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...

> Corn raises temp & humidity - https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/corn-fields-add...

> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources

Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.

> It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money.

What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.

>> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"

Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!

It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh.

Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.

Yes, it would be absolutely irrational and indefensible to block people from building solar farms where there is a straightforward commercial case for doing so. Unfortunately, "irrational and indefensible" is exactly what this administration is: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...

I work in the industry. Removing the tax breaks is having a material impact because we look at after tax cash flow. Next year installations are going to reduce meaningfully.

You are right it makes sense but that hasn’t stopped them from gutting all sorts of sensible programs both energy-related and otherwise regardless of the stage of investment/development. Have we forgotten about Musk and his mob already?

This administration is openly touting “beautiful clean coal” (doesn’t exist) for powering servers. Renewables are yet another front where people are divided based on politics. It has little to do with efficacy or practicality. I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...

It's more than just funding. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles and desire to use federal lands that will also be killed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...

>The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

Realisitically, solar is dead in America and China is the undisputed worlds #1 solar superpower. The US might hook up a few little projects here or there, but functionally the US is in full retreat on solar, cedeing the industry and technology to China.

Unless it gets outlawed, which I suspect is something Trump might do or attempt as part of his campaign in favour of fossil fuels and/or to own the libs/China.

I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.

(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy, but the linked article obviously isn't about that).

Per month or year? And what region?

Like monthly? Yearly?