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France Decrees New Rooftops Must Be Covered In Plants Or Solar Panels
An anonymous reader writes: A law approved in France Thursday now requires all new rooftops in commercial zones to be covered in plants or solar panels. "Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer. They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favoring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say." The law was actually watered down from its original version — businesses only have to cover part of their roof.
In other solar power news, reader SpzToid notes that despite earlier worries, the European power grid handled the solar eclipse just fine
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For most us in the northern hemisphere, it only makes sense to cover the south side of the roof with panels. Did they consider this?
A couple of hours of no power input from solar power is not, and never has been a problem for the European power grid. This sort of thing happens extremely regularly, every night. We're used to it, and can cope. Thanks for worrying about us, though; it really was extremely kind of you.
It better be a minimum percentage of the roof otherwise the law will be useless.
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Their firefighters are going to love that.
If they were serious they'd cover their football stadiums.
To be fair, they do at least require the pitch to be covered with plants.
Here's something I've been curious about. I would expect that if there's a between the solar panels and the roof, this would lead the attic to stay a lot cooler in the summer. Because the sun would be mostly heating up the panels and not the roof. Anyone know if that can significantly reduce the temperature of a home's living spaces?
2017-08-12 - A man fell to his death today while mowing the lawn on the roof of Les Olympiades. Witnesses claim to have heard him shout "Putain d'écureuils de bordel de merde!" while he fell down.
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I'm going to take broken / very old solar panels from all over, and sell them to businesses in France.
After all, the law didn't state the solar panels had to be hooked up to anything...
You probably don't want to know about my new plan to get ride of discarded trees and other vegetation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ugh! That was horrible!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Did you miss the words "commercial zone"?
That all new solar panels must have a house on them.
Mostly random stuff.
The article makes it seem that something like 25GW was offline for the entire eclipse for like a half a day.
Does anybody have graphs of time vs. power output for the whole day (preferably for Germany + the whole EU)? I suspect that the power dropped for maybe a ten minute period and then resumed as if it was a cloudy day -- but I need to see graphs!!
This is probably just a USA problem - it doesn't seem like rules in Mobile Home parks allow for anything on the roof. Will this law apply to this? Are there mobile homes in France? lol..
(of course i'm talking about the pre-manufactured homes that are just parked in large mobile home parks and never moved again)
Just switch to building cone structures without roof.
Problem solved.
If oceans suddenly rise or there are storms of unimaginable force seemingly caused by global warming then I would think that people would immediately take action. I would think that people would do some of the following things: Plant things on the roof, Put in Solar Panels on their roof, Paint their roof White, Paint any roads, parking lots, rocks, anything they can White to reflect the heat.
France will have built up an industry and have patents on technology to do the first two things in that list. Maybe it could be a big economy boost for France if and when 'doom' happens and everybody basically panics.
Does moss count?
Have gnu, will travel.
Sure are a lot of decrees coming from our masters who know what's best for us. Solar panels from the French. Regulated bullets, fracking, coal, networking, and healthcare policies here in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
You're right. Companies should be able to polute the rivers, pump toxins in the soil, everyone should have 50 cal machine gun nests with armor piercing bullets, coal plants should spew as much sulphur as they want, and we should let people die in the street if they can't pay for healthcare.
Hyperbole is fun!
I'll explain it to you, and I'll use small words: We all have to live together on the same planet. So people (and companies) are not allowed to do things to hurt other people. We can disagree about where to draw the line, but some of the examples you gave were stupid.
It consists of spending about half an hour arranging loose dead solar panels on the roof in an artistic pattern.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which is why attics are ventilated and ceilings are insulated. If a second cover over the roof made much difference most buildings would already have one.
Land of the Free and the Brave: land of hypocrisy where freedom is applied differently to companies and people depending of their social status.
People made the same comment when the gestapo came for the Roma, and then the Jews. People talk about the slippery slope because it's real. In the mean time, we'll welcome people who want to build out new manufacturing workspace.
Because the bible tells us the French are a bunch of devil worshiping socialists, our only recourse is mandated "Freedom Roofs", each with eternal flames fed by coal, used electronics, hippies, and any stray French we catch at the borders.
Better dead than green.
excellent
but some of the examples you gave were stupid.
ALL of the examples you gave were stupid.
Another negative would seem to be that it would be hard to find a material that could last for long periods of time with damp earth pressed against it.
Well an article from yesterday discussed how long lived biodegradable plastics were when buried in the earth. So maybe the answer is plastics. :-)
On a more serious note, ceramics? They seem to do quite well will damp earth when formed into pots. Sure a sturdier formulation would be needed, however we have ceramic roofing tiles that can be walked on and we have ceramic inserts for body armor that can stop high velocity rifle rounds.
You can do something similar with aluminum refining, which uses high power electrolysis. If we look around, I'm sure that other processes can be reorganized to make use of varying supply of electricity.
Thanks for the info. I'll add this and "water desalinization" (from a post further down) to my mental list of solutions.
I had *thought* that aluminum refining required the melting of bauxite, which would make it inherently difficult to start and stop, but another poster points out that Alcoa tailors their production in this manner. I'm guessing that a "charge" of ore can be processed in a short amount of time, and that a refinery has a large number of small furnaces which can be individually shut down as needed.
Did you miss the words "commercial zone"?
I've seen skylights / natural lighting in commercial buildings. It may not be common but it is an option. Should it be outlawed?
The storms you offer as a prerequisite would strip the plants and panels from the rooves. Maybe the white paint could survive.
as a green cash crop ?
Not only that, there are already tons of restrictions in how to build a house in many places. How high, how big, how strong. Those are just a few that will apply in many places.
And can imagine this being extended in the future to first cities and later the rest and perhaps even existing buildings.
If I look at cities from above, all I see is a lot of space that could be turned green. Garden places that are not used.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
People made the same comment when the gestapo came for the Roma, and then the Jews. People talk about the slippery slope because it's real. In the mean time, we'll welcome people who want to build out new manufacturing workspace.
Well done, Godwin.
"If you put this murder in jail now, next it'll be the Roma, then the Jews. Argle bargle ``Hitler!''"
Also, manufacturers won't likely be too upset by being required to put some solar panels up, which will eventually save them some money by the time they've depreciated to worthless. Then will continue saving them money on electrical and cooling costs.
Just as I was planning to move to France and buy a house with a roof made entirely of stinky cheese! Guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My employer used to have a green roof with grass or plants, I can't remember which. The roof ended up leaking and the building had a terrible mold problem. Some of my coworkers couldn't work on certain floors because of their mold allergies. They eventually got rid of the plants, redid the entire roof sans plants and spent a large amount of money remediating the mold problem.
Ivy's a natural wall climber in the UK, and quite often reaches the roof gutters of houses uninvited. If you deliberately planted some ivy roots in a box on the roof, you'd have living roof cover in just a few seasons. It catches its own thin "soil" layer from dust in the air.
Check that your roof tiles are properly anchored first though.
Gee, a lawmaking body that does something useful, sane and positive.
Imagine what we could do with that kind of rule-making here in the USA.
Never mind.
Never happen.
But we might get a law requiring rooftops covered in pools of evaporating petroleum...
Did you check to see if the regulation bans them? I doubt it does.
Either way, it's up to the people of France. If energy independence is more important to them than skylights, so be it. If Vlad Poutine decides to cut off the supply of energy to Europe in order to gather up more of the ex-Soviet territories, the European nations need to have a way to keep the lights on. It's not a matter of aesthetics, it's an actual power play between Russia and Europe.
Interestingly, when you get a contractor to do something, you can specify conditions on the quality of the work, such as "the roof must not leak". I suspect that may be an easier option.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Easier said than done. Covering the roof up with dirt and plant material makes maintenance and inspection very difficult and the rubber membrane will not last forever. Try finding a pinhole leak in a few thousand square foott roof covered with a few inches of dirt.
I'm sure the roof was fine when it was first built. It's the condition of the roof several decades later that was the problem. You can easily and cheaply reseal an asphalt roof. Fixing a plant covered roof is a lot more work.
The weight of a light covering with Sedum (very small, fatty ground-covering foliage that is very robust) will weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms per square meter. If your roof can't hold that, it will have serious trouble with a big snowlayer.
But will it be able to hold that weight PLUS a lot of snow? That's the main issue, you can't just max out the load because you need a margin for other temporary factors to not cross the margins.
It is interesting to say standard shingles would last twice as long not exposed to UV... I would like to see more studies on that, though it sounds reasonable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That would be cubic acres to you, sir.
Germany has similar laws already (albeit locally, I believe), and skylights are all over the place. It simply states that the roof area should be covered by plants or solar panels, and not what features the roof can have (such as skylights, water slides, helipads, etc.). Your faux outrage isn't becoming ;)
Germany has similar laws already (albeit locally, I believe), and skylights are all over the place. It simply states that the roof area should be covered by plants or solar panels, and not what features the roof can have (such as skylights, water slides, helipads, etc.). Your faux outrage isn't becoming ;)
What outrage? Its a simple question and skylights are recognized as a green technology. If anyone is being faux it is the person equating skylights with water slides.
this is a fake, there is no source that confirm this article. Never heard of this law here in France...