Solar Panels on a Tesla

Electric cars and

solar

panels

seem like a perfect combination. Clean, free energy, as long as the sun shines. A self-sufficient

solar

car that does not depend on the electrical grid could be recharged sustainably from anywhere you dare to venture, as long as it is not cloudy. Have you ever wondered about installing solar

panels

on your Tesla and why not all electric cars come equipped with solar panels for a stylish on-the-go charging solution? In fact, with the improvement of solar technology and smart engineering from the ground up, few self-charging solar cars are about to hit the market.

In this video, we'll delve into the nuts and bolts of vehicle solar and take a look at some of the early adopters of this emerging technology in 2017. Elon Musk suggested that Tesla would offer optional solar roof tiles on the Model 3, but then retracted the statement saying that putting solar panels on a car is not that useful because the actual surface area of ​​the car is not that much and cars are often located in the least efficient location. put solar energy in the car. Did you know that every hour the earth receives more energy from the sun than the entire world consumes in a year?

The problem is that the total area of ​​the earth is about 197 million square miles and the roof size of your car is much smaller than about three to ten square meters of usable space. It makes much more sense to utilize the large square footage of your home with a solar energy system like the Tesla Solar Roof and charge your car from there. the only problem is that you have to be home to use it. A car with integrated solar panels can be recharged from any sunny parking lot in the world and, if you are driving in perfect midday conditions, you can even charge it while you travel, extending the range. your vehicle while driving, potentially the additional incoming energy from the solar system could even enable a smaller, lighter battery system than in a comparable conventional electric car, leading to lower vehicle mass and energy use in driving to understand whether a solar car could really work.

We need to know how much solar energy the surface of a car can capture and how much range that energy will provide under realistic driving conditions. Solar radiation is often measured in kilowatts per square meter, so let's say a one square meter panel is being hit with about a kilowatt of energy in direct sunlight, unfortunately nothing in this world is perfectly efficient, especially devices that take raw energy and transform it into useful work. That's just thermodynamics. The most efficient modern silicon solar cells you'll find in a home system only work at best. 20 efficiency, but unlike a house, cars move, this creates unpredictable conditions and can lead to suboptimal solar panel angles.

Technically, you can cover every square inch of the car in panels, but, for example, covering the lower door panels won't do you much good. Well, since they won't get much sunlight and the proximity to the road will cover them with a thick layer of dirt and dust every time you drive, so let's take a sedan the size of a Tesla model that is almost five meters long and two meters . wide and placed a totally impractical hypothetical array of solar cells covering the entire plan view, a 10-square-meter rectangular area in direct sunlight, could charge its battery with, at best, 20 percent of 10 kilowatts of solar energy, reaching about 2 kilowatts in full sun. for about 5 hours per day, just as an approximation, that's 10 kilowatt hours of battery charge per day, at best, for comparison the long range plus battery option on the model s is 100 kilowatt hours, so our giant imaginary square solar panel could charge up to 10 of with its lithium-ion battery per day, this model has an EPA-estimated range of 402 miles or 647 kilometers, so we could be looking to gain up to 40 miles or 65 kilometers of range with this extremely optimistic and frankly unrealistic estimate, potentially a useful additional distance in a more practical scenario, the solar panels would only partially cover the top surfaces of the vehicle and have a much smaller surface area.

Now no one is saying they will get 100% of their power from an integrated solar panel system for the foreseeable future, any solar Tesla still would. They require the standard battery charging apparatus, but solar power could be a useful addition. Tesla's commitment to solar energy is well known and the Palo Alto giant offers solar roof tiles in addition to the Tesla Powerwall line of energy storage products according to Tesla's 2019 impact report. Model 3 models are less than half that of an equivalent mid-size ice car and if you install a solar energy system in your home and charge your electric vehicle with it, your carbon footprint can be reduced to almost nothing.

Musk's idea in 2017 that car roofs are small, inefficiently angled platforms for viable solar installations and charging from a home solar installation made more sense: you could even charge at night with stored solar energy and outside electricity. of the cheapest peak hour, however, Elon may have changed his mind, confirming that the cyber truck will offer a solar roof option on the bed of the truck on Twitter, elon said there will be an option to add solar power that generates 15 miles per day, possibly more would love this to be self-powered and adding foldable solar wings would generate 30 to 40 miles per day, the average miles per day in the US is 30.

In a previous video we imagined what a panel would look like foldable solar into a cyber truck and you may have noticed that we imagined it as a military cyber truck and equipped it with some additional advantages Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Brigham Young University collaborated to build a prototype of a set of solar panels that folds origami style to be used in space. This technology could be an interesting concept to explore in the automotive world on Earth, where more surface area could increase the solar output of stationary vehicles when it comes down to it, solar vehicles are all about efficiency, it's a question of energy to weigh a practical solar car would really need to be designed from scratch with low weight and low aerodynamic drag.

To create a vehicle with a more favorable energy density, as far as electric cars have come in the last decade, the energy density of gasoline is still much higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. One kilogram of gasoline contains about 48 megajoules of energy and a lithium-ion battery. The packets only contain about 0.3 megajoules of energy per kilogram. Gasoline still has more than 100 times the energy density of the batteries used in most electric cars. This is why planes still burn fuel and why we're not likely to see an electric 787 anytime soon unless a radical breakthrough in commercially viable battery technology enters service.

Teams gather each year in Australia to build pure solar cars across the continent, from Darwin to Adelaide, under the scorching desert sun. Back in 2013, a new class of race cars entered the competition: the cruiser class. Whereas previously the race was simply about building simple cedars, designs for vehicles that could carry passengers were now accepted and extra points were earned for practicality, passenger cars that could operate under normal driving conditions. Consistent winners in this class have been the evolving Stella series. from the University of Eindhoven, the team from which Light Year emerged in 2016. This young startup is one of the most prominent automotive companies dedicated to solar-powered vehicles.

This is a perfect example of engineering competencies and careers driving innovation for consumer products as lessons learned. in Australia's outback playground have stepped right into Light Year One, the first car offered by the company to sport five square meters of integrated solar cells along its low roof and bonnet. Lightyear One reevaluated every component of the car and used lighter materials like aluminum and carbon fiber to build a lighter vehicle with the best drag coefficient of any car on the market or independently driven in-wheel motors also reduce the weight of the car and improve powertrain efficiency in an interview with Automotive ev magazine CEO Lex Hoofsloot. described the positive feedback loop of weight reduction by focusing on efficiency and light weight, we can use batteries that are about half the size and weight of a conventional electric vehicle and half the energy consumption of an electric vehicle In the same segment, we have a battery pack that is two-thirds the size of a Tesla Model S and we can drive further than the Model S up to 800 kilometers in good sunlight and a minimum range of 400 kilometers without solar recharging and with air heating conditioning all in use and running high Driving speed, stopping, starting and initial acceleration demand power and waste energy in proportion to mass, typical and low-speed urban situations, while the power required to overcome the resistance of the Air increases proportionally to the speed cubed, depleting energy at high speeds, therefore the effectiveness of solar charging depends greatly.

On how the car is used to balance energy use, as Hoofsloot points out, the Light Year 1 is an electric vehicle capable of traveling 250 miles or 400 kilometers of high energy consumption even at night and is expected to achieve a nominal range of 450 miles or 725 kilometers even without its solar panels dripping with its 1.25 kilowatts of extra energy, which the company equates to 10 to 12 kilometers or 6 to 7 miles for every hour of charging, even while driving, this means that, while car self-charging is primarily a highly capable system A battery electric vehicle with a small light-year solar capacity notes that this solar charging adds up to 10,000 kilometers or 6,200 miles of free driving per year in the Netherlands and up to 20,000 kilometers or 12,400 miles in sunnier regions like Australia or California. believes that by eliminating the steps between the sun and the wheel it should be possible to gain overall efficiency by a light year, as Tesla did before starting at the top of the market with a premium price of one hundred and seventy thousand dollars for its first complete version.

A similarly sized luxury car with future plans to launch smaller, more affordable vehicles in the future. Sono Motors, on the other hand, is starting with a 29,000 more affordable compact family car designed for urban use. When designing the Scion prototype, the German startup analyzed the driving patterns of real-world motorists and found that a typical trip from home to work and back to Europe or the US could be up to 16 miles or 25 kilometers. Sonos' proudest new technology integrates solar cells into polymer body panels to replace conventional painted metal bodies. These weigh so little. between four and eight kilograms per square meter, compared to five to twelve kilograms per square meter for metal panels or 10 or 20 kilograms per square meter for flexible or glass-clad solar panels, respectively.

Importantly, Sono claims to be able to produce them at the same cost. as painted metal, although that includes the initial expense of building and operating a paint production line, a cost that reduces per car panel as more cars are produced. These robust, damage-tolerant plastic body panels have the added advantage of being able to be mounted on the sides of the vehicle which increases the solar cell area in a car where glass panels used for light years can be risky vertical panels, as in The doors, however, can rarely be expected to point directly into the sun and reach their full potential and will often be completely shaded when you park next. to walls or other cars, sono's founders are exploring some other intriguing ideas, including bi-directional charging to allow solar-generated power to be fed to other cars or returned to the grid or even used for storage and stabilization of external renewable energy connected to the grid.

Toyota has experimented with a Prius demonstration with thin-film triple junction cells.High efficiency manufactured by Sharp whose efficiency is claimed to be 34 compared to that of its commercially available silicon based solar panel of 22.5. Energy Solar, a Chinese thin-film panel manufacturer, has also unveiled prototype cars with panels that can generate 8 to 10 kilowatt hours per day and has supplied such panels to Aston Martin for its GTE racing car. Most solar panels rely on cells made of semiconducting silicon. crystals that convert sunlight into electricity between 15 and 19, but new technologies are being worked on to create more efficient solar cells using new materials.

Organic molecules, such as polymers, can form the light-absorbing layer in a photovoltaic cell and could potentially be semi-transparent absorbers. infrared light and let visible light pass through, which has intriguing implications for automotive applications such as windows. Organic cells can also be flexible, allowing them to be installed on irregular surfaces more effectively than traditional glass panels as future and more cutting-edge solar technologies develop. When they hit the market, we can see self-charging solar electric vehicles becoming more and more practical as the cells become more and more efficient. Future solar technology with efficiencies above 50 would be a game-changer and likely make solar cars ubiquitous.

Heavy batteries are a limiting factor in the viability of solar cars. An innovative battery with more favorable energy and weight characteristics would revolutionize electric transportation and make solar cars much more realistic. Promising new technologies using materials such as graphene solid polymers and ceramics are currently in research and development and are poised to create the next generation of powerful batteries with higher energy density, longer lifespan, faster charging, improved safety and potentially even lower costs. Most experts agree that we are probably at least a decade away from a fundamental commercial disruption in battery chemistry, but there is a lot of scientific knowledge and commercial attention in this sector and the stakes are high, so stay Attention, if you mount the solar panel well on your Tesla, we do not recommend a home conversion.

With a heavy and delicate home panel, aerodynamically inefficient, however, with a fresh design of new vehicles whose architecture revolves around solar cells and a design philosophy of maximum efficiency and lightweight construction, the future is bright and this technology may be viable. Do you believe in an electric? In future if yes please like this video and subscribe to our channel. We show cutting-edge sustainable technology. You might be interested in watching one of these videos below. Thanks for looking and have a great day.