Solar panel canopies: How to fight climate change with parking lots

[pensive violin music] This is a satellite image of the Mojave Desert in the US. It's a fragile desert ecosystem... dotted with wildflower fields and Joshua trees which are iconic in this region. But over the past several years the landscape has started to change. If you take a closer look in certain areas you start to see more and more of these patches of blue. They’re are solar farms. And in this part of the US many environmental activists and local residents are not happy about them. “Joshua trees are torn down to make way for solar projects.” “... causing quite an uproar...” “...piles and piles of Joshua trees.” It isn't just the trees. Solar farms in rural areas can take up valuable agricultural land and disrupt diverse ecosystems. But transitioning to more solar power and a more sustainable future for the US requires a lot of land. So, what if we could find some of that land inside our cities? [Urgent piano music] This video is presented by Delta Airlines. In 2021, President Biden announced ambitious plans for the US to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050. Solar is a critical part of the plan. And over the past several years as the US has ramped up solar power generation... the vast majority of solar arrays have been built in rural areas. According to one study over half of utility scale solar facilities were placed in deserts. Another third in croplands. 10% in grasslands and forests. And just 2.5% in urban areas. That makes sense. Putting solar on undeveloped open spaces is often is often the cheapest and fastest way to do it. But there are some major problems with this path. Large scale installations often mean bulldozing massive amounts of land... altering plant and animal growth and migration patterns. Or locals don't want a solar farm to ruin natural views. Or they want to preserve farmland. When you start to go bigger and bigger... then it starts to become less comfortable for people. That's Joshua Pearce. He's been a photovoltaics researcher for two decades and is a professor at the University of Western Ontario. And so we've seen progressively more and more resistance in the middle of the US... to large scale solar development. That resistance has sometimes been funded by fossil fuel companies... but people also have legitimate concerns. And across the country from Massachusetts to Ohio to California... solar expansion has been stalled by protests. One option that we're starting to see more of is agrovoltaics. It's a way to build solar arrays that allow for agricultural use between the panels... to preserve some farmland for crops, grazing, or native species. But because the need for energy is mostly outside of rural areas... any kind of rural solar still means building long distance transmission lines that can be expensive and an eyesore. One thing that can help address some of these issues would be a kind of large, open, unused space closer to cities. Enter: Parking lots. The US has a lot of them... thanks to decades of designing cities around cars. Parking lots cover over 5% of developed land. These spaces could play one part in helping to fix solar’s land problem... if we covered the lots in canopies of solar panels. There is an awful lot of parking lot space in the United States that we can take advantage of that's already essentially unused. It’s wasted space except for parking underneath it. And it's not even used most of the time. It's an idea that other parts of the world like France, are embracing. A 2023 policy in France will require that outdoor car parks with more than 80 spaces... cover at least half the surface area with solar canopies. And officials estimate it could add ten nuclear power plants’ worth of solar panels. Importantly, policy like this utilizes space that's already cleared land with little biodiversity... which is also close to consumers. And parking lot solar canopies could also provide shade to cars in hot weather and cover from snow. So why don't we see more parking lot canopies in the US, too? Like canopies that could cover Disney World parking lots. Instead of the solar farms they built on nearby land that used to be orchards and forests. Or covering some of LA's many parking lots instead of overbuilding in the desert. Well, the biggest obstacle to putting solar on parking lots is... cost. The cost of putting in a solar canopy is going to be 50% to even 100% more than a conventional solar farm. The thing that makes canopies more expensive than a conventional solar farm is they're higher up off the ground. And so you need more structural material and you also need more weight at the bottom holding them from blowing away. And so why would a company want to invest even more money to put in a canopy? They're actually is an answer to that question. In 2017, Pierce coauthored a study looking into the economic potential of parking lot canopies and used Walmart Supercenters as a case study. The study found that in places with high solar flux or more solar radiation in the area... solar canopies could be incredibly profitable. Like here in Phoenix, Arizona. But they also found that even in areas in the US considered to have less solar flux, like here in Michigan... selling solar back to the grid at going rates... could still be profitable enough to make solar canopies worth it in the long run. It really goes down to... how much are you paying for electricity... and how much solar flux do you have? And most of the US, barring Northern Alaska actually has fairly good solar fluxes. I grew up in western Pennsylvania which has some of the worst and systems are still economic there. In another 2021 study, Pearce and his team found the total capacity across all US Wal-Mart Supercenters would be 11.1 gigawatts of solar power. That's around the high estimate of what the French parking lot program expects to make. With that power... Wal-Mart could power about 100 electric vehicle charging stations at each Wal-Mart location... or if they combine the canopies with rooftop solar there would likely be more than enough to power the stores. It would also create the opportunity to sell power back to utility companies on the main grid... or stores could be the anchor for a local microgrid in the community offering power to homes in the case of outages. This isn't a one size fits all solution... but in good locations where companies can afford the upfront cost of installation. Pearce’s research shows canopy's could be a worthwhile investment. It's guaranteed under warranty to generally work for 25 years. That's an investment. You're investing in capital asset and it’s providing you a return over its lifetime. You should treat it the same way you would any other investment. Only this one is actually good for the planet at the same time. In some parts of the US institutions like airports and universities are already trying solar parking lots. Walmart and Target are just beginning to try them out in certain stores and policy is slowly catching up too... to make these kinds of solar projects easier... like Maryland offering grants for solar canopies... and a New York City zoning proposal... that would allow for solar on more than 8500 acres of parking lots. Parking lots can't fix solar’s land scarcity problem on their own. The amount of solar production we need will likely require a combination of efforts, including in rural areas... utility-scale arrays canopies where we can put them arrays on rooftops... and in other places like along highways over landfills or on degraded lands. But solar canopies are part of a large toolbox... that could put a huge dent in our reliance on fossil fuels... and point to a future where more cities... are finding ways to give new life... to some of America's most overlooked spaces. I love that feeling when it's the beginning of fall and it's 55 degrees outside, and it's finally cold enough to wear my favorite winter sweater and jacket and beanie and gloves. And I drink pumpkin spice lattes to stay warm. But I also love the feeling when it's the middle of winter and out of nowhere it's 55 degrees. So I leave my parka home and go outside in my shorts and t shirt and i feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. And I consider going to the beach to tan because it's so warm. The temperature is the same, but my reaction to it is vastly different. Part of the reason why is that there's more of a substance in my body in January as compared to September. It's the same substance that allows kids and teens to handle the cold weather better than adults. When you're hot, you sweat. When you're cold, you shiver. But just before you start to shiver, your body actually does something else. It starts to burn fat, not the fat we usually think of. There are two categories of fat that we like to think about. There's the white fat. White fat is the one that we tend to just think of as fat. It's called white because it looks white. White fat exists all throughout the body, cushioning our bones and organs. That's Dr. Aaron Cypess, by the way. White fat cells have many functions, one of the most important being that they're the body's primary energy source. Every single day we are using the fuel that's inside the white fat cells. But there's another type of fat that has a totally different function, brown fat. These cells are much smaller and because of that, resemble muscle more than fat. Instead of one large lipid droplet in a white fat cell, the brown fat cell, is one tightly packed bag of mitochondria. This is what gives it its brown appearance. And if you remember anything from high school biology class, you know that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Brown fat, instead of serving as an energy reserve for organs throughout the body to burn, uses its power to burn energy on its own. And unlike white fat, it's only located in a few tactically positioned areas. It is in the neck, the shoulders, in the upper arms. It's down the spine and then some places within the belly. Lots of overlap with major blood vessels because warming the blood effectively warms the whole body. The brown fat around the neck vessels heats up, the blood goes to the brain, That's good. The brown fat depots in the shoulders, that blood, once it's been heated by the brown fat, goes right very quickly into the heart and then can get pumped to the rest of the body. And that's the first line of defense against the cold. If it's not enough to raise the body temperature sufficiently, then the body shivers. But one of the craziest things that I learned while researching this story is that babies can't shiver. When babies are born, they do not have the muscle mass, and really, perhaps not even so much of the coordination with the brain and the muscle to shiver effectively. So they need other ways of generating heat and brown fat is part of that. Babies are born with a lot of brown fat. According to the Cleveland Clinic, about 2 to 5% of a baby's body weight is made up of this stuff. It's necessary for our survival. The peak age for brown fat actually seems to be in the teen years, which explains why a lot of the guys in my high school wore shorts in the winter. But as we get older, our body makes less of it. And this could give us some insight into why kids seem to run hot and our parents or grandparents seem to run cold. Older people, they certainly have much less brown fat in terms of absolute and relative amounts. There's also less muscle, which is also important for generating heat. The similarities between brown fat and muscle don't end there, though. If you work your brown fat out, it also increases volume and the way you do this is by exposing yourself to the cold for extended periods of time, as this 2014 study shows. Look at how much more brown fat these men from Maryland had after a month of exposure to cold temperatures. And look how much less they had when exposed to warm temperatures. Which gives us some insight into why 55 degrees in the winter can feel so much warmer than 55 degrees in the fall. Brown fat doesn't just keep you warm, though. Scientists have figured out that having more of it correlates to lower risk of diabetes and heart disease. Studying the effects of brown fat using cold exposure is challenging, though. One challenge is that it's hard to dose cold. How much... I gave you ‘this’ amount of cold. I mean, you know the temperature, but it's hard to know what you're doing and therefore it's very hard to design a study where it's reproducible. So instead, they're trying to activate brown fat with medicine to study how burning it affects us biologically. A medication called Mirabegron, which is approved to treat overactive bladder, was able to activate the brown fat in a way that was very similar to the effectiveness of the cold exposure. There's a lot we still don't know about brown fat, but we do know that our bodies use it to adapt to cold weather. And when a kid doesn't want to put a coat on in the winter, it's not necessarily that they're just stubborn. It might just be because they have a little more of something in their body than you do. In Top Gun: Maverick. All of this... is real. These actors trained for months to pull up to eight G's And cameras mounted inside of the F-18s captured real intense flying. Just look at the ripples on Jay Ellis’ face. But this shot is different, because this plane doesn't exist. It's called The Darkstar, and it uses hypersonic technology, a tool that's in development by Lockheed Martin, but nowhere near ready to be used like Tom Cruise's Pete “Maverick” Mitchell does. This scene is almost entirely fabricated, from Tom Cruise's convincing sweating and heavy breathing to the impeccable VFX. But the thing that grounds it for me is the sound design, which is why I talked to this guy. I'm Al Nelson. My job on Top Gun: Maverick was to define the soundscape for the film, from jets, to doors, foley, ambiances motorcycles, and all things maverick. Expectations were high. The bar was very high. There wasn't a ‘good enough’ option. It always needed to be as best as it could be. When Al's team first got the mach ten sequence, it sounded something like this: a blank slate with one big question How do you make fake flight feel real? What does the Dark Star sound like? First of all, working backwards. It's not an F-18. It's not a fighter jet. The Darkstar is much more elegant. It's much more advanced. And one of the things that was important was for that to be believable as well. It shouldn't sound like a video game. It can't sound sci fi. You think, of course, of Star Wars, you know, the tie fighters are amazing, but they're sci fi and they used elephants to make them. And so we worked hard, lots of field trips to aircraft carriers, cross-country trips for jet engines and auxiliary power units. We are trying to tell the story of Maverick's flight. Everything we're hearing and seeing should feel as real as it can feel so that we're experiencing this with him. And Al’s job was to make sure that the experience captured all the intensity of Maverick pushing the dark star to its limits. It starts with sounds of technology that we're familiar with. So when you see Maverick launch, he's using turbines. We wanted it to have punch and feel high tech. It doesn't ramp up. It just goes ‘ca-chunk’ and then thrust. Maverick gets up in the air and, as he starts passing new thresholds... Increase to mach 3.5. ...there's this subtle beep... Increase to mach 3.5 ..that starts a simmering build of tension. Like Pavlov's dogs, we're being trained to know that this tone will keep repeating until we get to the coveted mach ten. But before that, he has to go faster, this time using technology that most of us don't yet have a reference for. Transitioning to scramjet. A scramjet uses the speed of the jet to intake oxygen, which ignites the fuel as opposed to a turbine. A turbine can only spin so fast and can only generate so much oxygen to ignite the fuel. All of that process needed to be articulated sonically. He kicks it in the scramjet and then you see the turbines close and you see the tube open up in the back of the Darkstar. At that point, you've got this flow of air going into the jet system and igniting that fuel and creating that rocket. And then the plane is on its way. Maverick starts getting comfortable. We’re feeling good. And the soundscape reflects that, by becoming slightly more subdued. Because the other thing we're doing specifically with Dark Star is we are trying to tell the story of his joy of being in this flight and achieving that which no one has done before. He's the fastest man alive. And so there are moments where we're just with him as he's smiling. The plane focused sound design pulls back and other elements take the forefront. It's a lot of layers, but it's also it's not necessarily accumulating. It's alternating. It's orchestrating. You know, when he says, Talk to me, Goose, there's not a lot else going on, because we are with him emotionally. You see the dark star go off in the distance. That's very much a music moment. So you don't need a lot from us at that point. And we're just a dot and we're just a little rip as you hear it. Scan across the sky so you can track it and then the music drops out very dramatically and we cut to him and it's boom. And you feel a little bit of shaking and you hear that turbine kick on and you feel those thrusters. Instead of having all these clips sound fade into each other, you feel every single cut. One of my first interactions with Tom. He said ‘the cuts have to hit. They have to punch.’ He was very, very emphatic about that. And it's a style that the first Top Gun established, that aggressive cutting, style of cutting from inside and being just dialog and rather quiet to banging on to the exteriors. Coming left! And it makes the cut feel aggressive. It makes the film feel aggressive and dangerous, and it propels us in the story. Each of these cuts has a unique sonic texture. You cut to the rear and it just bangs on with this ripping, tearing rocket thruster. And you see all of those currents crossing the wings, the jet stream. It's such a beautiful visual. And we wanted to put something in there that was tonal and special, which was the Roebling Suspension Bridge. So all of these flavors allow it to be constantly changing and constantly new and hopefully exciting. To ratchet up that building tension, Al’s team used a longtime sound design trick, the Shepard Tone, an auditory illusion, where you loop a sound wave separated by octaves, which tricks your brain into thinking that it's a continually rising pitch. Listen to it here in the rising turbines. So the jet is starting to complain a little bit and so more tones are happening. And yes, that mach 9.7, 9.8 each time it's a little bit louder, a little bit higher. It's that winding you up. And then the minute he does it, catharsis. Mach 10! [cheers] Catharsis But just when you think it's over, we return to quiet and then we start again with the build. Oh, don't do it. Don't do it. Just a little push. But this time the build is different. It starts with this beep from inside the control room, which plays off this last beep from the Darkstar's cockpit. When you listen to them both next to each other, it's a rising tone and then a falling tone. And this subtly signals that danger is coming. The shepherd tone kicks in louder and more grating than before. It leaks into the sound muted cabin. So we know that the pressure is building and it keeps building until... [Explosion] You know, it took some hard work to get us to this final version. Did some late nights and long hours, but I'm very pleased and excited with with how it's been received and how it sounds. I know they did design an actual Darkstar that he sat in. You can see him sitting in it and then at a certain point it launches over our head and that's when we get into the magic of cinema. That was an F-18 that they then remapped the Darkstar over it. And that jet was so low that when you see the roof of that shed blow off, that was real. That was an unexpected addition. And the fact that Ed Harris just stands there and takes it like that guy is something else. Maybe this was a mistake. The United States has always had a love hate relationship when it comes to train travel. The country was literally built on the backs of the railroads and the US used to have the biggest and the most well-funded rail network in the world. But if you ask anybody that's taken the Amtrak... they'll tell you that that's not exactly the case anymore. The US has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world when it comes to train travel. So what the heck happened? How did the United States get so far behind? And does it have any chance of catching up? To find out the answer to that, I'm going to take the Amtrak from here in Los Angeles all the way to New York City. And I'm going to have plenty of time to think about it since it's a... 70-hour journey. I guess I better get started. The entire length of my journey from Los Angeles to New York is about four days long... and for the first leg of my journey there weren't any sleeper cars available. So, this is what my living space looks like for the next two days which as somebody that's [BEEP] years old should be really good for my back. The journey I'm taking is pretty different than it would have been about a hundred years ago. To see the differences, let's take a look at this US map. The year is 1916 and there's about 254,000 miles of railroads the highest number there's ever been in this country. The Pennsylvania railroad, or the Pennsy, as it was referred to... I feel like that nickname could have probably used a little more work. Nevertheless, it was the largest corporation in the world at the time. It's difficult to illustrate how influential these companies were... and how much railroads were into woven into the fabric of American life. They were responsible for the temples of their time... like Penn and Grand Central stations. Also, you would not believe how amazing train travel could be back then. Sure, they had basic boring train cars like the one I’m riding. But the upscale trains featured chandeliers, barber shops... pianos and food service that would make the Four Seasons look like Boston Market. One menu featured oysters, consommé... and celery fed duck. The bad news is my train didn't have ducks that were fed anything. I ate the Thai Red Curry Street noodles which, although I'm pretty sure they were just a microwave frozen package were actually pretty good. And although the accommodations were a far cry from crystal chandeliers they were comfortable enough. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is the conductor speaking. It has now been 5 hours and 15 minutes which is the time it takes to fly from LAX to Newark Airport. And we are still in California. It's only 9:00 but it already got dark outside so there's nothing to look at through the window... and there's no Wi-Fi, apparently. So I guess I'm just going to go to sleep. They leave the overhead lights on all night but luckily I brought my trusty eye mask. I also brought some earplugs, which should come in handy because I'm sitting right in front of some iPad kids who are watching movies at full volume with no headphones. So, that's fun. All right. I'll see you in the morning. Did I sleep well last night? Hmm? I'm going to say no. I'll spare you the details but imagine getting literally kicked in the head by the woman in the seat next to you. I wound up retreating to the observation car to sleep... which was less than ideal. Like an astronaut in space. I'm trying to move around as much as I can so that my muscles don't deteriorate during my journey. So let's talk about how American trains went from gilded pleasure palaces to... This. Part of the reason why railroads became so wildly successful in the first place... is because they were run by what were affectionately termed “robber barons”. Men like Cornelius Vanderbilt... Jay Gould, James Fisk, and J.P. Morgan. These guys were ruthless, anti-labor, and really corrupt... which was great when it came to building an expansive kingdom of highly profitable rail companies... but bad when it came to... just about everything else. As a result, the train companies became pretty universally hated by the general public. As seen in what passed for scathing satire at the time. “Now then, Jim.” “No jockeying, you know.” “Let em rip, Commodore.” “Don't stop to water or you'll be beat.” The federal government saw the kind of crap these guys were pulling and was like “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't do that.” So they instituted a bunch of regulations... which, among other things... set fixed rates for the railroad companies. And also prevented them from raising their fares or changing their service without the government's permission. This didn't seem like that big of a deal at the time... because as historian Robert Selph Henry said... “The problem , to some minds at least was how to keep railroads from making too much money.” After all, railroads were still by far the most efficient and the best way for most people to travel. This all obviously changed when affordable automobiles and later air travel came into the picture. so much so that by 1956 only 4% of passenger travel was on trains. When you take into account that 40 years earlier that number was 98% you can see how much the US’s priorities had shifted when it came to travel. The train companies were far from a monopoly anymore... but they were still being regulated as if they were... which was killing them. Okay, so, right now we are being held on the tracks to let a freight train pass. And this is actually the perfect time to talk about something. Private commercial passenger trains have never been very profitable. The lifeblood of the industry has always been these: Freight trains. But rail companies were always forced to provide passengers service as a benefit to the public. So when the rail companies began to suffer and then eventually fold, the government had the idea to take the responsibility for passenger service off the plates of the rail companies who could then focus on the profitable freight side of the business. They took all the passenger service and combined it into one company. Which is how in 1971 we got Amtrak. Which stands for the American Train Track. Again, what is up with these nicknames? “Amtrak makes it easy come, easy go to more than 450 cities in the USA.” But here is the thing. Amtrak was designed to fail from the beginning. That may sound ridiculous, but let me explain. First of all the government created Amtrak as a for profit corporation despite the fact that virtually no passenger service anywhere has been profitable. After all, the government broke off all the passenger trains from the rail companies because they weren't making money. When the government formed Amtrak they tasked it with employing innovative operating and marketing concepts to develop the potential of modern rail service. And how much did Congress give them to do that in their first year of operation? Just $40 million. Their budget has gone up a lot since then. Their budget for the year 2022 was $2.3 billion... which sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But when you take into account that the federal highway budget for the same year was $64.3 billion you begin to see the inequity. To put it even more into perspective... the sum total of all the subsidies that the US has allocated to Amtrak in its entire history... is less than one year's funding for the interstate highway system. This right here shows where America's priorities lie when it comes to travel... and why Amtrak has failed to majorly expand or innovate. Okay, so we just got to Chicago. I got off the Amtrak about 45 hours after I left Los Angeles. And needless to say... I do not smell very good. I have about a 7 hour layover here in Chicago. And right now I'm in Union Station... which is actually kind of amazing. As you see I got a chance to put on some clean clothes which feels amazing. And now I'm just here in Millennium Park... rolling around with my suitcase like a dang tourist. And I'm just trying to enjoy... not being on a train as much as possible before I get on the second leg. The second and final leg of my journey. I've achieved the Holy Grail... of my own private room. I want to show you my favorite feature of the entire room. You're going to like this. Hidden sink. This train is a little bit more... dynamic, shall we say, than the last one. But I'm hoping that all the movements... will just help rock me to sleep. When I woke up, we had reached Ohio... about 2600 miles through my journey and 50 something hours. There are a lot of reasons why people still want to take the train. A big one is the environment. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania... a long distance train trip produces 37% less emissions than taking a flight. Trains are also much safer than cars. You're 17 times more likely to die while driving than taking a train. Flying and driving can be faster and sometimes even cheaper than taking the Amtrak. But they're both often miserable experiences. Going through TSA dealing with flight delays or being stuck in traffic and not being able to do anything because you need to be driving the car. While I've been on Amtrak I've been able to just stare out the window and see the country go by... or read a book or take a nap or whatever. I've been able to wander around the train whenever I want and stretch my legs. And I've had the enjoyment of having my own private little room. And this is with Amtrak being perpetually and profoundly underfunded. Imagine what it would be like if this were evened out. So, I made it. All total, took me about 72 hours and 17 minutes... which granted it would have taken me between 5 and 6 hours to fly that distance. I don't actually know the distance off the top of my head but I'm going to add it in post right here. But here's the thing. I had a good time. It was actually really fun. Aside from a couple of hiccups at the very beginning. It was a really pleasant, memorable experience. I got to see parts of the country that I had never seen before. And overall, dare I say, it was a pleasant experience. Right now, Amtrak covers roughly 21,000 miles of passenger rail in the US. But when you look at the map, you can see it's sparse coverage routes that don't connect... And sorry, Wyoming and South Dakota you don't get any trains. If the United States took Amtrak off life support... it would revolutionize the way people travel around the US. When he was retiring former Amtrak President Graham Calder said... “When I came to Amtrak I was convinced I could save it...” But finally came to the conclusion that only the American public can save it... “...when they say they want it.” Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go take a much needed shower and go to sleep in a real bed. I got to rest up for my flight back to California tomorrow. For me, one of the best parts of riding the Amtrak is just throwing on some Phoebe Bridgers and wistfully staring out the window for hours on end.