[filoleg]

I recently was at the Vegas airport, and what struck me was the parking lot.

It was the same parking lot I saw many years ago. But this time, instead of feeling sorry for the owners of the cars that were obviously getting cooked up, that whole are was shaded in bajillion solar panels.

It seemed like such an obvious win-win for everyone, I expect it to catch on fairly quickly.

[foobarian]

But, isn't the albedo of a solar panel farm still way dark? It means the radiation is still being captured rather than reflected back up.

[BurningFrog]

Capturing the radiation to convert it to electricity is the whole point of solar panels.

[lstodd]

Even if it was just 0 albedo no generation, irradiation on whatever's parked beneath would be cut in half plus rest of (re-)radiation converted into far-ir. This is not unuseful. Just don't mandate this kind of thing in places where parking lots have to be cleaned up with bulldozers in winter.

[jyounker]

If there are solar panels over the parking lot, then the parking lot doesn't have to be plowed. You can design the panels at appropriate slopes to direct the snow off the lot.

[mirashii]

You're not looking at the albedo of the solar panels in isolation though, you're comparing it to asphalt and cars. Typical solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05.