Covering large parking lots with solar panels is an idea that goes back decades but in America at least it’s an idea that has never really taken off.
What is the reason for that? Is it due to the overall cost or is there something else that keeps Walmart, Target, Costco, Sams Club, Malls, etc. from covering their parking lots with these panels and selling the power?
That’s actually part of the point. Installing and maintaining solar panels on the roof is expensive. Installing them essentially on open ground ought to be significantly cheaper
You have to have a roof to have a building. It’s a built in cost. The only extra is expensive in a buisness roof build out is more electrical wiring and panel supports. You can also generally walk between them to maintain them.
Putting panels on the roof, especially the generally flat and accessible business roofs is way easier and cheaper than building out entirely new 12ft high buildings with trenched cabling and then adding panels.
No buildings, just solar panels on poles. You don’t risk the roof or the stores business. You can use heavy equipment like trenchers. No one has to set up scaffolding or risk a potentially deadly fall.
We have huge amounts of real life evidence that solar panels on poles in an empty flat elf are far cheaper to install and maintain than solar panels on a roof, especially a business that wants to stay open.
Solar panels on poles is probably somewhere in between. It seems like they’d be much cheaper, like solar panels on poles in a field, but I don’t know if real life bears that out yet
If you’re going up put them in a parking lot, they have to be up high enough that people need lifts and fall protection, and in order to actually use the parking lot you’ll need some heavy duty concrete supports, not just “poles”. And that’s before you even get into the cost of the electrical infrastructure. All the conduit will need to be buried, which means ripping up the parking lot and then repaving it, new subpanels and inverters, new meter, god knows what regulatory requirements…
You clearly have no experience or research into this matter so please stop assuming that you’ve figured it all out. It’s not as simple as all that.