The Town of Normal is studying its parking garages to make sure they are maintaining their structural integrity as well as investigating their future capability to handle more electric vehicles in the future and heavy solar power installations.
“As we anticipate growth in electric vehicles we want to make sure parking decks are designed to accommodate the weight of the growing electric vehicle population and making sure our parking decks can handle the growth of electric vehicle quantity in the community,” said Normal City Manager Pam Reece.
There’s an anticipation there will be more EVs on the road despite the average EV price being around $60,000 in America and that’s actually gone up this year. There’s also an anticipation despite the US EV market struggling with price cuts and rising inventories. There’s an anticipation despite protests against Chinese Communist Party EV battery makers and UAW breathing down the necks of Ford, GM and Stellantis.
Reuters puts it this way: “Automakers North America have billions of dollars in EV-related investments riding on how the next several quarters play out. If production of EVs continues to outpace demand, automakers will have to choose between slashing prices and profit margins, or slowing assembly lines.”
“On top of that we would like to explore whether or not our decks could absorb the weight of any kind of solar installations that we might want to put on [them] in the future,” said Reece.
“So before we consider (solar installations) we just need to do an analysis of what kind of weight can our decks accommodate and if we need to make modifications in the future to the structure of the decks we need to plan accordingly,” said Reece.
Those in the transportation industry say there’s a potential problem regarding the heavier weight of these vehicles and parking garage designs. This is especially a concern with older garages.
There is a shortage of statistics available on what impact the electric vehicles are having on parking structures.
David Waterworth points out that it’s not just electric vehicles that are heavier but that traditional gasoline powered vehicles have increased weight tremendously in the last few decades.
Waterworth recently wrote an article on the subject published on Oct. 13 by Clean Technica titled Will Electric Cars Collapse Multi-Story Car Parks (Parking Garages)?
“My Tesla Model 3 SR weighs 1.8 tons (3582 pounds) not appreciably more than my late V6 Sonata, said Waterworth. “Even the ubiquitous Toyota Corolla has almost doubled in weight in the last 20 years, going from 0.6 tons (1187 lb) in 2001 to 1.5 tons (3031 lb) now.”
“When I picked up my granddaughters from school this afternoon, over half the vehicles in the car park … were large SUVs,” said Waterworth.
Waterworth argues the problem is not so much an electric vehicle concern but simply a heavier vehicle concern.
CNBC agrees with Waterworth. Anmar Frangoul wrote an article published on Oct. 3 titled As EV sales surge and cars get heavier, parking garages will have to change.
“Driving is changing,” said Frangoul. “Today, hybrids and pure electric vehicles are a common sight around the world, and the overall size and heft of cars — whether they’re fully electric or use internal combustion engines — is increasing. Parking garages… are one area where the proliferation of EVs and bigger vehicles is expected to have a major impact.”
Frangoul quoted Chris Whapples of the Institution of Structural Engineers as saying, “… the trend for bigger vehicles shows no sign of letting up. We’re seeing increasing numbers now of SUVs, large executive cars — both fossil-fueled and battery ones — and pickup trucks, which are immensely heavy.”
“We said, as an industry, we must actually check our car parks out,” said Whapples. “We want is the public to maintain confidence in our car parks and structural engineers. If it’s not strong enough, then it will need strengthening, It may not need strengthening everywhere, it might be just individual elements.”
“The Institution of Structural Engineers, and myself in particular, are not anti-EV,” said Whapples. “We’re really trying to facilitate new car parks to actually cope with EVs and the general increase in size of vehicles across the board.”
Energysage is a company that sells solar canopies for parking lots and garages, they were bought out by France-based Schneider Electric, which is a Fortune Global 500 company. In April 2021, Schneider introduced ‘The Zero Carbon Project’. Since then, it has shown its commitment to minimize ‘operational carbon emissions’ by 2025.
According to Energysage, “The benefits of solar are well documented: when you install a solar energy system, you reduce your electric bills, protect against rising energy costs, and reduce your environmental impact.”
Solar panels have be known to catch on fire; here are local examples:
Crews find source of grass fire near Farmington underneath solar panels
The Olympia school fire is causing a nationally-known Tesla whistleblower to speak out about against defective electrical connectors
Augustana College rec center’s roof catches on fire
Energysage says an advantage of installing a solar canopy is, “When you build a solar canopy, you add more uses to the same square footage and don’t have to set aside additional space.”
Earlier this month Maya McFadden of the New Haven Independent reported in a story titled Parking Lot, Meet Solar Panels that a New Haven Connecticut school board approved installing solar canopies over parking lots at two schools in its district.
“The Board … unanimously approved a non-financial agreement with Greenskies Clean Energy to finance, design, install, and maintain the solar arrays in the parking lots of Hill Central and Beecher,” said McFadden.
“The vendor will then sell electricity produced by the parking lot solar arrays at each school to the city at a fixed rate for the full two-decade term of the power purchase agreement.” said McFadden