[Bazinga]

Was just reading a price per charge article online and someone mentioned installing a solar array at home to produce the electricity needed to power your car and if there's excess, to power your home. So if you plan to drive electric vehicles for a very long time to come, this could be a good investment.

Has anyone thought about this?

 

[Roth33d]

I was thinking about doing this for the cottage and home in the suburbs, good for the cottage since it will make us less dependent on a gas powered generator and of course serve dual purposes.

i'm sure it's expensive but looking at the savings over a few years or more it should then begin to break even.

 

[Electric Mike]

Depends where you live. You need quite a bit iof space to install enough of them to actually amke a difference. The price also needs to get more reasonable before it would have any chance of actually paying for itself over time.

 

[Raymondjram]

There is another problem with the purchase of photovoltaic panels only for EV charging: you can charge only during sunny days! And it will be useful if you are at home during the day and consuming electrical power.

Until energy storage is included for night consumption, and overnight EV charging, these systems will alieve but never replace utility supply. Tesla Motors is designing the Powerpack for this purpose but the Gigafactory has to be up and running before the Powerpacks are plentiful and at cheaper prices to justify buying them for energy storage.

 

[volta]

Are you saying that the panels only charge the Bolt, they can't store the energy to charge the Bolt at a later time.

 

[Roth33d]

That's another reason for having power stored from time the sun is out, at least that way your always making use of solar energy.

People who live off the grid and use solar charging systems probably already do this for their homes. Best thing to do is look into what they've been doing and how they do it.

 

[Bazinga]

I'm sure there are storage options out there but companies need to come out with better batteries where they lose less power while charging.

 

[Electric Mike]

That is indeed one of the issues right now. They are working on it though. I wonder if the futurists have predictions on that.

 

[Roth33d]

Predictions? It's more like if they are working on it, things like this have to be planned out well in advance and takes times to come to fruition alone. What we end up seeing is what happened years after all the development and planning started.

 

[Bazinga]

Just read that solar panels still work on cloudy days, just not as efficient and they're trying to come up with ways around that. Just need to powerwall to store it all and you can install multiple batteries.

 

[Roth33d]

Not bad at all, but at least depending where you live cloudy days probably won't be an issue, I can only recall maybe a few cloudy days over a year span and during those times i hardly went out.

 

[ChevyGuy]

Solar panels

Was just reading a price per charge article online and someone mentioned installing a solar array at home to produce the electricity needed to power your car and if there's excess, to power your home. So if you plan to drive electric vehicles for a very long time to come, this could be a good investment.

Has anyone thought about this?

I came across this article from gizmag, "Researchers claim to have hit on the right combination of solar cell type and battery to charge an electric vehicle battery with higher efficiency than ever before. The team behind the research says the system could soon make it possible to attach small cells to a car that will charge the vehicle while being driven – on a sunny day, at least."

Could you just imagine how convenient that would be? Charge as you go, "on a sunny day,"

Just a matter of time, when they can create something like this in the future.

Electric vehicle would be the way to go from that point, yes?

 

[Bazinga]

Would be convenient but a car just doesn't seem to have enough viable surface area for solar panels. Probably just the roof and the hood.
I think some scientists tried this and realized that there just isn't enough space. Probably get a few extra miles but that's it and not worth it for the cost.

 

[Roth33d]

This might help to position a market for car panels with solar technology. An entire roof dedicated to this will be a good solution.

 

[Bazinga]

@MasterElectrician how do you store the electricity from your solar panels?

 

[Roth33d]

@MasterElectrician how do you store the electricity from your solar panels?

Probably has a flux capacitor, those things are compact and they store a ton of power!

 

[MasterElectrician]

@MasterElectrician how do you store the electricity from your solar panels?

Our Solar array is 'grid tied' that is to say we don't have any storage for the solar panel electricity. The excess power we generate goes back on the electrical grid and the utility pays us the retail rate for the power. The kilowatt hours go into a 'bank' that we draw from when the sun isn't shining (like at night). What we generate goes into the 'bank' and what we use comes out of the 'bank'. This is called 'Net Metering'. Feel free to google the term "net metering" for more info.

 

[Bazinga]

Your solar array looks like the stuff of dreams! I was thinking of just mounting a few on my roof since my backyard doesn't have the space needed to do something like that.

Good to know that energy storage isn't needed where you live. Now I just need to check with my electric company to see if I can bank what my solar panel gets during the day. That should eliminate the problem of what we would do if we charge at night with no sunlight.

 

[Roth33d]

for solar systems like posted above, if you're putting that on your property, checking with your local by-laws is important. Don't want to be spending $2k on a solar setup only to be told you can't have it. Some places have weird by-laws.

 

[Bazinga]

You'd think towns and cities would want people to go green but nope, it could cut into the electricity provider's profits... But yea, this banking method would work and In won't need to store anything on a battery. Nothing ever happens around my neighborhood to warrant a loss of electricity. Only occurred 2-3 times since I've lived here over a span of 20ish years.