Daily Perspective: France car parks and PV
Local generation, EV charging & home cooling ?
France wants all of its larger carparks, new and existing, to have rooftop solar. If we take the plan a bit further, we could see the potential to power local residential building cooling and EV charging.
One part of the solution to decarbonising electricity generation is local generation via solar, combined with local consumption - preferably consumption where demand is aligned with maximum generation periods. A new law in France might help to start this process.
France wants all of its larger carparks, new and existing, to have rooftop solar. New legislation, recently approved through the Senate will require all parking lots with spaces for at least 80 vehicles to be covered by solar panels. A recent article in electrek covered this story.
What then can we do with this electricity? One obvious answer is to inject it into the grid. We suggest though thinking a bit more laterally is a good idea. So, think for instance building cooling in the summer, which is a rapidly growing electricity demand source (up 212% from 2010 to 2019). Plus, EV charging, which we wrote about recently. At the risk of stating the blindly obvious, cars sit stationary in car parks, often for hours. So why not provide charging services, powered by the electricity generated from above you.
And adding in services can solve the funding question. A company such as LightSourceBP (lots of other providers are also available), has experience in building and operating MW scale projects, plus their parent company has an interest in EV charging through its bppulse subsidiary (again other charging companies are available). We are not advocating BP as a partner, it's just to illustrate that providers of service turnkey solutions do exist.
It’s clearly not quite that simple, but you get the drift. I discussed in more detail the changes we can see coming around electricity generation and consumption, in a blog for The Sustainable Investor. These changes will potentially throw up a lot of new opportunities for companies, something that investors need to track.