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MotorTrend reports https://www.motortrend.com/news/kia-plant-solar-power-hail-protection that the Kia assembly plant in Georgia suffered very expensive hail damage to new cars waiting to be shipped, back in a storm in 2023. The fix is a massive raised solar array of 3.2 million square feet (300,000 meters^2) over the car park/storage area.
The system has about 17,000 solar panels on the columns of a structure that is large enough to protect about 15,000 vehicles from the elements until they are loaded onto trucks or rail cars for delivery. Hail damage costs billions of dollars a year.
The panels are not all connected yet. Construction began in 2024 and the goal was to be done in the first quarter of 2026 but panels are still being installed. It should be finished this spring.
VPS [Vehicle Protection Structures] has provided this kind of protection to dealerships, but this is the first large-scale execution for an assembly plant.
The partnership is also working with Georgia Power to optimize energy production and integrate the power generated by the solar panels into the plant. The panels will be capable of supplying 10 percent of the plant's energy needs. The project also provided credits under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act until that act was terminated.
Pics at the link, sort of like large "pop-up" shelters. To your AC submitter it's quite attractive.
Insuring the solar panels for hail damage seems like it would be cheaper than insurance to cover the same area of cars.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 03, @03:25AM (1 child)
Oh, I don't know, imagining a hurricane blowing into those 20' panels, that's a lot of surface and the wind force scales quadratically with the wind speed... I'm afraid many will require replacing every year or two.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 03, @04:41AM
Hurricane resistant structures are a remarkably small delta in cost from what mostly gets built... Commercial code only went to 120mph winds, and they're pretty accurate about that, so when a 155mph storm hits, it gets ugly fast. Building to 160mph instead of 120 might be an 80% increase in materials cost, but only maybe 15% increase in labor costs, so net increase in construction cost is more like 20%.
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