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I have something like 6 or 700 square feet on my roof since 2009, and on a good day they may output 50-60 kWhr of juice. Of course panels are more efficient these days, but nowhere in the realm where they might be useful for significantly charging your car as you drive.
But as far has high current, with proper transformers and/or inverters I do believe that they can do high voltage. After all they can run at least one of my two A/C's.
I can see the best use for solar panels would be on a big ship where an electric motor can power the propellers and a big ship has enough roof space to mount multiple large panels to charge a built in battery. There's no way it can be viable on a car. So many clueless people still asking for panels on a car roof.
Using solar to power cars is folly because anyone who understands how solar panels work knows that's not gonna be sufficient to generate a very slow current when BEV is a high current high output electric device.
If you're saying this, then you fundamentally do not understand solar vehicles and how they're meant to operate.
All production or production intent solar vehicles have batteries on them. The vehicles are not meant to take and limited only to power generated by the solar panels and directly putting them into the motor. Absolutely no production or production intent solar vehicles operate in that manner.
Instead, what happens is that power generated from the solar panel goes into a battery and accumulates energy over time. How this ends up working has to do with the fact that almost no consumer vehicle in the world is purchased to be operated 24/7 in constant motion. As you are almost certainly aware of them, the way most people use them is to get from one point to another where oftentimes the vehicle remains stationary for a period of time--sometimes a very prolonged period of time, e.g. parking. Additionally, thus far among production and production intent models, the idea has not been that the vehicle only uses energy generated from solar cells to drive the vehicle but rather for the solar cells to effectively act as a range extender for the vehicle where the vehicle can go longer between charges and/or spend less time at and draw less energy from chargers. In that sense, one somewhat analogous way to think about them is as how hybrid powertrain variants for your usual internal combustion engine vehicles have acted where it doesn't radically change the way you use the vehicle for the most part, but does have some mild benefits that is meant to outweigh a bit of additional upfront cost.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-25-2023 at 03:25 AM..
It is more complicated than what some think it is. To make it more simple for Tesla EV owners to understand the match, follow these instructions (below). it will tell you how many solar panels you will need, just to produce enough power to charge your Tesla car model, and the amount of sunlight/daylight hours needed: https://thegreenwatt.com/how-many-so...harge-a-tesla/
But if you have enough real-estate and can afford a solar panel array, control panel and inverters, plus a bunch of storage batteries. Go for it. Just don't forget to enter the sun into your equation. As for construction costs, I have seen numbers (after the government incentives) just under $20,000.
It is more complicated than what some think it is. To make it more simple for Tesla EV owners to understand the match, follow these instructions (below). it will tell you how many solar panels you will need, just to produce enough power to charge your Tesla car model, and the amount of sunlight/daylight hours needed: https://thegreenwatt.com/how-many-so...harge-a-tesla/
But if you have enough real-estate and can afford a solar panel array, control panel and inverters, plus a bunch of storage batteries. Go for it. Just don't forget to enter the sun into your equation. As for construction costs, I have seen numbers (after the government incentives) just under $20,000.
True. Some people are paying over $20,000 these days. Labor hours cost more from year to year, too. I imagine that to "solar charge" the enormous Hummer's battery within 4-6 hours would require a pretty good-size solar panel array
True. Some people are paying over $20,000 these days. Labor hours cost more from year to year, too. I imagine that to "solar charge" the enormous Hummer's battery within 4-6 hours would require a pretty good-size solar panel array
212 usable kwhr battery. My 10KW - 40+ panels put out 50 kwhr on a good day. Maybe 25 on a bad day.
Summarized Table For Charging Tesla With Solar Panels
There are small 50 kWh Tesla Model 3 and big 100 kWh Tesla Model S batteries. You might get 4, 5, or 6 peak hours a day. Based on these variables, we have calculated how many 300W solar panels you need to charge any Tesla in 1 day if you receive an average of 5 peak hours per day:
Tesla’s Battery Capacity (in kWh): Number Of Solar Panels Needed (300W):
50 kWh (Model 3) 44 solar panels
60 kWh 53 solar panels
70 kWh 62 solar panels
75 kWh 67 solar panels
80 kWh 71 solar panels
90 kWh 80 solar panels
100 kWh (Model S) 89 solar panels
Interesting. But one has to understand that it would be an odd residential solar system that only charged the car. And also odd that the car's battery was drawn all the way down every day.
With my system, we decided that if we go EV, we would put up more panels. My current system only covers the whole house 100% for a few months in the spring, early summer. And now that they are 15 years old, they barely do that.
I think we're sort of getting away from the original topic which is solar panels that are integrated into the vehicles themselves rather than solar panels mounted elsewhere to generate electricity for use in electric vehicles.
Even with that latter conversation, listing the number of panels needed to fully charge an electric vehicle from empty over the course of a day is one that makes very little sense. Vehicles are averaging between 3 to 4 miles per kWh and the average US driver supposedly goes about 37 miles a day though with very high variance on that average. Since real world range of EVs being sold now is about 250 miles, then obviously it's an extreme rarity to have to fully recharge from a completely empty battery to a full battery so using the total battery capacity is incredibly misleading since almost no one is looking to charge the full 50 kWh, 60 kWh, 70 kWh, ... 120 kWH, etc. a day. Instead, what you're looking is probably more like a 9 to 13 kWh of recharging needed a day.
In essence, that charging calculator is pretty much nonsense unless you're someone who is regularly driving hundreds of miles per day, and if that were the case, then that does mean your payback period on the solar panels and the electric car is probably much, much shorter than average since that means the amount of gas you would have used in that time period for an internal combustion engine vehicle would have been incredible.
Of course, 9 - 13 kWh is still pretty difficult for vehicle mounted solar panels to generate in a single day, but as stated earlier, none of the automakers that have solar panel mounts in production or with vehicles with production intent have them restricted as the sole method for powering the vehicles. All of the electric vehicles with solar panels on them have charging ports and the idea is for them to act more like range extenders so that you don't need to charge as much or as often which is somewhat analogous to the hybrid powertrain options for internal combustion engine vehicles where you don't need to go to the gas station as often and/or don't need to spend as much on gas.
There is a company called Aptera working on a highly efficient car with solar panels that can add up to 40 miles of range a day sitting in the sun.
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