France’s law has been met with huge enthusiasm by clean-energy advocates, who say solar parking lots can help clear a massive hurdle to renewable rollouts: land scarcity. Carbon-free power sources like solar, wind, and hydropower all take up much more space than the dirtier fuels that they’re meant to replace (coal, oil, and gas): analysis by Bloomberg News found that a solar farm needs 140 times more land than a natural gas plant to produce the same amount of power.
In the U.S., more than 90% of people support developing more solar farms, per Pew Research, and officials want to build between 760 and 1,000 GW of solar capacity to meet the Biden Administration’s goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035. Yet from Texas to Virginia to Maine, attempts to turn land over to solar have sparked fierce local protests about the loss of farmland, natural areas, and views.
But the one thing the U.S. has no shortage of? Parking. By designing its major cities around the car in the 20th century and forcing developers to include parking in almost every project, the U.S. has built up hundreds of millions of parking spaces—far more than in France. As of the early 2000s, parking covered 2–5% of urban land in the U.S., and it’s likely even more now.
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