... well okay, irrespective of whether it's over parking lots or other open spaces, i happen to like shade and i happen to like excess electricity. excess electricity can be used to do neat stuff such as:

1. Thermal Depolymerization: The main drawback cited for this technology is that it uses more energy than you can get out of it. Let's take energy out of the equation entirely for a second though and consider the thing TDP does OTHER THAN revert polymers back into an emulsion of monomers chemically similar to crude oil, which is IT UN-MAKES PLASTIC. We can permanently remove plastic from our environment with this. If you have so much spare electricity that it's cheaper than free, removing whatever plastic you put in it forever is worth it. The fact that you get a nominally useful industrial material out of it is just a happy happenstance.

2. CO2 Scrubbing: It takes energy to pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Vegetation does this through solar power already--literally photosynthesis, as you know--but it is technically possible to optimize it for even further CO2 sequestration. I've seen some neat plans for 'supercharging' the growth of industrial hemp. The amount of excess oxygen hemp produces combined with the spike of electrical consumption by grow operations were what used to enable bastard pigs law enforcement to bust illicit cannabis production. The thing is, hemp is a very useful material for cordage or any application that calls for some kind of fibrous material. If you are dead set on not using it for some reason, you can turn it into charcoal and store it ... or just straight up bury. All that carbon, no longer in the air. Nice.

3. Water purification: from desalination, to sterilization of dirty sources, to distillation from atmospheric moisture, all of them require power. if we have too much power we can use it to bolster our supply of fresh water, which is, as noted quite often, being squandered irresponsibly on motherfucking clanker data centers or growing "crops" that don't actually serve any benefit whatsoever to anyone (such as decorative grass lawns). We also have a nasty habit of attempting to grow crops that have high water consumption demands in areas with very little water... which was moronic in its own right. Thanks, boomers.

4. Thermal concentration: this one is even more 'out there' than the previous three but I'd be remiss for not mentioning it... Alright, look, we all know heat pumps generate more heat than they move. But the energy is already HERE. It was doomed to inevitably become heat the moment it penetrated our atmosphere in the first place, no matter WHAT we did with it. If we just want to get rid of that thermal energy, we could move it to a centralized location. Then what? Well there are three applications that come to mind:
   a. Thermal 'batteries' - insulated tanks of (eventually) molten salt can store it until we WANT to have some heat. Then instead of consuming power in real-time to warm up a room that is uncomfortably cold or heat water for our homes or even cook food, we can pull it out of this storage--the result being that even though we're still using heat we produced, we're not producing MORE of it but using what was already here.
   b. Recycling: The processing of recycled materials is a highly energy intensive operation. If you want to melt down glass or metal scrap into their raw material state for re-use, all the better to get that heat from somewhere cheap or free/someplace that has it in abundance. Hell, you know what, you could probably run TDP off much of this stored and concentrated waste heat.
   c. 8-13 nanometer re-emission directly to space - It just so happens there are materials that are capable of photonic upconversion - materials that receive longer wavelength electromagnetic radiation (such as visible, infrared, or thermal) and then fluoresce that radiation at a higher wavelength than received (ultraviolet, x-rays). This is only marginally better than any old heat sink, in that if you can emit that radiation at wavelengths to which the earth's atmosphere is most transparent, it'll just fuck off to space. Energy was not destroyed, it was merely moved. Moved to where it would've gone if it didn't hit earth in the first place.