Commercial PV

By : Matthew

Posted June 29, 2010 11:46 to EnergyWise Blog

I just read a fascinating statistic...there is over 40 billion square feet of unused commercial rooftop space in North America alone. That is over 1400 square miles of space that does nothing but provide shelter from the elements!

Conservatively, only about half of that space could be filled with solar electric panels. It takes about 5 acres of space to fit 1 megawatt of solar energy. That works out to a little over 91,000 megawatts, or 91 gigawatts of power potential on commercial rooftops in North America alone.

To put this in perspective, a solar panel is usually around 3 ft. x 5 ft. in dimensions, so it would take a lot of panels to fill that much space. Not for the faint of heart. But because businesses stay in their locations much longer than the typical home owner, that makes them the best carriers of solar energy systems in the future.

Just a little something to think about. Things are getting brighter! ;)

2 Comments - comments rss

bert

July 29, 2010 00:26

I would think that apart from small businesses that rarely own their space or make decisions about what can be put on the roof that churches would be a better target to utilize all that unused space. A grid tie system would mean that the 80% of the time that the building is not being used would be paying for the little time the facilities are in use. Churches, schools (building up credit all summer long) and organizations that do the majority of their events in the evenings or on a couple of days durring the week.

Gregory Smith

September 25, 2010 03:32

Actually, that is clearly true and makes the very best sense if you have $40,000-$80,000 to invest of the church’s money, however, most pastors are more concerned with souls than saving money for 40 years, even though it seems like a no brainer. Once it can be shown and proven, they become huge fans of their own revenue producing utility, but in certain states,like Oklahoma, they can’t make use of this benefit, so the size of any system must be built to go for maximum for the minimum, which means, evaluations of costs have to be identified for the year and for the seasons, in order to get a best return result. I suspect more and more churches will do this once they can show their bankers a definite return on investment by the solar company…And when they do, just watch those solar companies say, “Praise the Lord!”