Maybe if I lived closer to a nice beach, I’d enjoy August more, but I don’t, so as it is, August is one of my least favorite months. It’s usually so hot and dry here that going outside is only pleasant in the early morning and the evening around sunset, so I don’t end up doing much gardening or hiking and spend the month waiting for cooler temperatures to return in September. Hopefully. The forecast for the first week of September this year is currently showing daily highs that are still well into the 90s so there’s at least one more week of summer to go. 🥲
At least I’m lucky enough to live in an older neighborhood with a lot of shade from mature trees. Every time I go to more exposed parts of the city in the heat of the day, I can feel myself start to bake. My city has set a goal to increase the tree canopy to 40% city-wide after a heat map showed dramatic differences in temperatures between neighborhoods with more than 40% tree canopy compared to neighborhoods with less than 20% tree canopy. I’ve been reading recently about similar projects around the world, like the “Green Corridors” of Medellín, Colombia.
I like learning about these types of projects, it gives me hope for the world. Organizations like the Arbor Day Foundation and American Forests offer tons of information about how to support and participate in these type of urban reforestation projects.
Speaking of creative ways to stay cool, the other day while I was hustling from my car to a store across a hot, sunny parking lot, I remembered the solar panel-covered parking lots I saw in Arizona and wondered why there’s not more of those outside of the Southwest. It seems like such a win-win solution. The business gets to supplement its income with solar energy generation and the driver gets to return to a cooler car. Shading parking lots with solar panels would also provide some protection from rain, snow, and hail and extend the life of the parking surface, since the asphalt would heat up less in the shade and be less affected by extreme temperature differences between night and day.
It seems like such a no-brainer to me that I knew there had to be something more complicated that I was missing to explain the lack of solar panels over every large parking lot, so I went and did some research and indeed, it is more complicated than just throwing up some some solar panels and calling it a day.
The biggest obstacle, as I expected, seems to be the upfront cost. Solar parking lots are more expensive than ground-mount systems or roof-mount systems due to the need to place them much higher above the nearest horizontal surface. Existing parking lots would also need to be retrofitted for electrical wiring in addition to the supports and panels themselves. There’s also some issues like safety (the system has to be able to withstand someone crashing into a support pole with their car) and theft potential (easier to steal from a carport than a roof) that need to be considered. Lastly, an issue I hadn’t really considered is that many businesses, even large, wealthy chains like Target and Walmart, technically lease their stores and offices, so installing a new solar parking lot can run into the same problem that often delays renovations in rental homes: namely, the tenant doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on improvements to a property that they don’t own, and the landlord doesn’t want to undertake an expensive improvement project that will take years to pay off.
Nevertheless, none of these obstacles seem insurmountable, especially if local, state, or national governments offered incentives, so I hope that the use of solar parking lots will continue to expand alongside programs like my city’s tree canopy goals. I think it’s great that we have both low-tech and high-tech solutions to problems like the urban heat island effect, so that areas where one solution doesn’t work can try the other and thus maximize the benefits of both.
Anyway, all this to say that it’s been too hot to do much more than the bare minimum in my garden, but hopefully I’ll be back with some fall updates soon. The plums are almost ripe, which means it’s almost time for Marian Burros’s Plum Torte, and that’s one more reason to look forward to fall!
