California Wind Mills

East of Los Angeles and East of the Bay Area, they are everywhere! And I thought Wisconsin was cool with their two off from HWY 41. No, I think California has us beat.

While driving past all of these windmills, I began to think of other potential sources of "clean" energy. Why not solar panels over parking lots or interstate higways? (Actually, this was inspired by being stuck in traffic in the middle of the desert outside of Las Vegas at 1:00 PM yesterday... it was about 103 degrees).

Are solar panels so inefficient that having them over the hundreds of thousands of football-field sized parking lots would still not generate enough energy/$ to cover their maintenance and installation expenses? Well, I have only seen this attempted once so far, and it is in Madison, WI behind the Municipal Building... and they only have three.