France made it the law. Every big parking lot in the country has to be covered with solar panels by 2028, or the owner pays a €40,000 fine every year. The idea: stop bulldozing farmland for solar projects when every Walmart, mall, and stadium already has acres of empty parking lots. Almost no one in America has done this. The reason is cost. Covering a parking lot with solar panels costs roughly twice as much as putting the same panels on an open field. The panels themselves are identical. What jacks up the price is everything underneath them: the steel pillars holding the panels up, the concrete foundations anchoring those pillars into the ground, and all the engineering work needed to make sure a roof full of glass and metal doesn’t end up sitting on someone’s Toyota. On a field, you stake the panels into the dirt and walk away. So when a developer is picking between an empty cornfield and a Walmart parking lot, the cornfield wins almost every time. Roughly half of America’s biggest solar farms now sit in deserts. Another third are spread across former farms and ranches that once grew corn, wheat, or raised cattle. Almost none sit on the parking lots we already paved. Joshua Pearce, an engineering professor at Western University in Canada, ran the numbers. If Walmart alone covered its 3,571 supercenter parking lots with solar canopies, those parking lots would generate enough electricity to permanently shut down four large coal-fired power plants. A separate study covered by Time magazine looked at every parking lot in the country. If the US covered the big ones the way France is doing, those rooftops alone could put out roughly twice the electricity America’s existing solar panels currently produce. The higher estimate puts it at more than three times, all from asphalt sitting there already. Instead of waiting for the market to figure this out, France passed the law in March 2023, set the deadlines, and added the fine. Their parking lots are expected to produce as much electricity as ten nuclear power plants by 2028. Another option the meme leaves out entirely: you can grow crops directly underneath solar panels, as long as the panels are set up on tall poles for tractors to drive between them. It’s called agrivoltaics. The US already has more than 560 of these dual-purpose farms. At one University of Arizona project, peppers grown under the panels produced three times more fruit. Jalapeños needed 65% less water because the shade kept the soil from drying out in the Arizona sun. The math agrees with the meme, but the market keeps picking fields. Until America passes a law like France’s, the bulldozers keep heading for the cornfields.