Why not turn airports into a giant solar factory?

Next time when you take off or land you are looking out the window of the plane, give the airport a scan. You will see hangars and other support buildings and of course terminals. But most of all, you’ll see a lot of empty places. Airplanes, as many aeronautical engineers have pointed out, are like open spaces, for obvious reasons, including not fixing them with trees.

Do you know what they like about open spaces too? Solar panels, which hate not only trees but also the shade of tall buildings. So why aren’t we covering our airports with solar arrays, dedicated spaces that can’t be used for anything other than air travel business? Well, it just so happens that airports have a lot of empty spaces, a lot of rules.

But first let’s talk about their potential. New research from outside Australia shows how effective it would be to sunbathe 21 airports in that country. The researchers scanned satellite images of the airports to find space for a wide roof, as solar panels avoid shadows best and found a total usable area of ​​2.61 square kilometers or 1 square mile.

For comparison, they also scanned satellite images and found 17,000 residential solar panels in the town of Bendigo, south of Melbourne, south of Australia. Researchers estimate that airports can generate 10 times more solar energy than 17,000 residential panels – enough to power 136,000 homes. Perth Airport alone would create twice as much as Bendigo. (Perth is very sunny, and the airport has a lot of big buildings.) They also estimated that solarizing all 21 airports would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 152 kilotons a year, equivalent to taking 71,000 passengers off the road.

With the sun shining, the Australians are sitting on the energy equivalent of a gold mine; Large roof spaces at airports offer the opportunity to centralize solar energy production. Installing panels from house to house is great, and no one says we should stop because we need all the solar energy we can get. Commercial panels are larger and more efficient so they can create them more power. In addition, residential roofs come in all shapes and sizes, making it harder to work than a commercial roof that is usually flat. “Imagine the labor to install all forms of residential buildings,” says Chayn Sun, a scientist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Geospatial Technology, the author of the news. paper describing modeling Journal of Building Engineering. “Compare flat-roofed and low-rise airport buildings.”

Airport sunbathing can strengthen the airport itself and as well as exporting energy. “In addition to being self-sufficient, they may have excess electricity that they can send to the grid to supply the environment,” Sun says.

While paneling these roofs can be effective, it still won’t be easy. In the United States, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration must prove to airport officials that their new panels will not create any glare by throwing sunlight into the eyes of pilots and tower air controllers. (That would not be the problem, thanks to modern solar panel coatings, but that’s what officials need to consider in planning.) The FAA also wants to make sure the panels don’t interfere with airport radar communications.

Also, assembling the panels on existing roofs would require renovation work, which would add costs, says Scott Morrisey, Denver International Airport’s vice president of sustainability at DEN. But when building new structures or expanding terminals, solar power can be incorporated into the plan. “In fact designing and integrating the sun into that building makes it much more profitable than going back and trying to renovate old buildings, ”says Morrisey.