Ben Marchant , Chief Operating Officer at 3ti , explores how urban spaces are changing through integrating solar technologies into our public car parks , changing our transportation , environment and public spaces forever .
T he UK has around 30,000 car parks with some 13 million public and workplace parking spaces across a range of locations , including offices , shopping centres , train stations , offices , sports venues and factories . If just 20 % of these spaces were converted to solar car parks , annual solar generation would be around seven terawatt hours of electricity . To put this into perspective , this would replace all the UK ’ s remaining coal-fired and oil-fired stations power stations .
Looking more closely at 2035 needs , just over a decade away , the UK government and Deloitte break it down like this . We need five times as much solar capacity , 23x as many EV charge points and around £ 50 billion of upgrades to the grid to connect them all alongside the electrification of heating . That ’ s a lot of money , and we ’ re already below target . That means we need new technologies that enable this energy transition to happen much faster .
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By utilising existing spaces in areas such as car parks , we will be able to speed up the process and catch up to other European countries , such as France – who last year approved legislation to install solar panels on all car parks with more than 80 spaces . Solar car parks are the perfect opportunity to tap into an otherwise underutilised resource , providing an immediate solution to the UK ’ s need to ramp up the roll-out of solar and electric vehicle charging infrastructure .
Solar car parks are the perfect opportunity to tap into an otherwise underutilised resource .
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