French parking lots could soon generate as much electricity as 10 nuclear power plants. Find out more.
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One challenge of increasing solar power coverage in a densely populated country like France, he said, is finding ways that don’t compete for land use, said Arnaud Schwartz, the president of France Nature Environment, an umbrella group of French environmentalist organizations. Taking away agricultural land or open fields and giving it over to solar farms is unattractive, but covering parking lots “harms biodiversity a lot less,” he said.
The plan to require solar-panel-covered parking lots is part of a bigger piece of legislation, the Law for the Acceleration of the Production of Renewable Energy, that French President Emmanuel Macron has made a centrepiece of his “The beauty of a Walmart parking lot is, if you cover a Walmart roof and its parking lot, then it has more power than it needs,” he said.