22.5 percent efficiency for 55 cents a watt solar from an American company!
by JIM STONE
Made by an American company! This is good enough for installation on practical solar cars. 22.5 percent efficiency hits the threshold, where something like a Honda Oddyssey could easily have enough solar panels installed on the roof to generate over 4,000 watts. That is far beyond the ability of any 120 volt household outlet. If parked in the sun with worst scenario stationary panels, such a vehicle could produce, all by itself, 24,000 watt hours of electricity per day, which is easily enough for most people to drive to work and around town on. Obviously if any sort of mechanical system to move the panels to track the sun was installed, that output would double to 48,000 watt hours daily.
What does that add up to? If you base the possibilities on the Tesla roadster, and then subtracted about 20 percent so you would not have to come up with something as perfect, you could drive at highway speed for 10 miles for every hour it sat in the sun. You could go a lot farther at lower speeds (20 miles on an hour of charge if you only went 50 mph) If you actually hit Tesla's efficiency, that would increase to a little over 24 miles. So it goes like this: Your car sat in the sun while you were out shopping at a store 5 miles away. After doing groceries and odds and ends, you arrive home two hours later and your car generated twice the electricity it used and is charged better than when you left.
You could work 30 miles away from home, and your car would, even if you started out with a nearly dead battery at the beginning of the week, drive you to work and back every day at highway speeds, and then on top of that generate enough surplus power to fully charge the batteries and be ready for a 300 mile week end trip.
It would generate so much power that most people would have uninhibited driving, at the same time they plug their home into the car and live totally off grid.
The only thing your car would not be able to do is a 1200 mile grind, which I have done a couple times in my life. But the kind of power that it could generate on it's own would add up to about 30,000 miles per year, which is more than double an average American drives in a year.
Unlike a gasoline powered car, city driving with an electric car would use less energy per mile than highway driving if it had proper regenerative design. So it would be at it's best where people would use it most.
All of this is based on 22.5 percent efficiency from a dirt cheap solar panel design made in America approximately a decade before anyone expected such a panel to be made. This new solar panel from Solar City is the first product from that company, and it really makes the dream of 30 percent efficiency from a cheap panel look like a relevant prospect. If 30 percent efficiency is achieved, it will hit the barrier where even a heavy car can be pushed at 50 mph with no charge in the batteries at all. Tesla's equations are for higher speed use, if you only wanted to plod along at 40 mph, even the current panels could push something like a Honda Oddyssey at close to 40 mph for as long as the sun was up.
HERE IS THE MATH THAT PROVES IT WITH WORST CASE SCENARIOS:
This is worst case scenario math, for converting normal cars over to electric - cars that are not designed for electric, and not just a dream:
Let's use my example - the Honda Odyssey, a hateable and loveable behemoth, perhaps the biggest mommy van on the road. The Odyssey weighs 4,396 pounds. Hardly a practical weight for a solar car.
Probable worst case scenario.
It is six feet seven inches wide. It is 17 feet long. That would allow your solar panels to be seven full feet wide, and 18.5 feet long with little overhang. Approximately 130 square feet. That is an advantage I guess, but what do you expect on something that huge?
During peak, the sun will deliver 1000 watts per square yard. A square yard is 9 square feet. you would have 14.444 square yards of panel. That would be 14,444 watts of sun power delivered. Times 30 percent efficiency from the panels, for 4,333 watts delivered continuously. A horsepower is 746 watts. Take 4,333 and divide it by that. You have 5.808 horsepower continuous to work with.
Use the Ecomodder calculator to see this. Enter a drag coefficient of 0.25 and a weight of 4390 pounds and leave the rest of the numbers where they are, because they are averages and I don't have all the specs for the Odyssey. A chart that shows watt equivalent will come up below the calculator. There you will see the Odyssey really would be able to go 40 mph with solar panels alone, and a dead battery. It is an exponential curve, so do not expect more. But plodding along at 40 with no fuel and a dead battery in a Honda Odyssey is a relative fantasy concept, no one would have thought that would ever be possible, but even today, close to that is possible (because the exponential power requirement curve puts 22.5 percent efficiency and 30 percent efficiency relatively close as far as how fast it would go.)
This is also why, for practical use you figure 10 miles per hour of charge rather than 40, when you could go 40 miles on an hour of charge if you drove like a tree hugger. But no one is a tree hugger, RIGHT? Reality: you go 80 mph when possible.
My equations above are for practical use, the way Americans actually drive. If even a Honda Odyssey could be converted to a usable solar car RIGHT NOW, A practical solar car everyone would love really is possible and would be affordable, RIGHT NOW.
Obviously if you took the worst case scenario - an Odyssey, and modified it to be lighter, the results would be better.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/215555-0-55-per-watt-from-solarcitys-record-breaking-new-solar-panel
by JIM STONE
Made by an American company! This is good enough for installation on practical solar cars. 22.5 percent efficiency hits the threshold, where something like a Honda Oddyssey could easily have enough solar panels installed on the roof to generate over 4,000 watts. That is far beyond the ability of any 120 volt household outlet. If parked in the sun with worst scenario stationary panels, such a vehicle could produce, all by itself, 24,000 watt hours of electricity per day, which is easily enough for most people to drive to work and around town on. Obviously if any sort of mechanical system to move the panels to track the sun was installed, that output would double to 48,000 watt hours daily.
What does that add up to? If you base the possibilities on the Tesla roadster, and then subtracted about 20 percent so you would not have to come up with something as perfect, you could drive at highway speed for 10 miles for every hour it sat in the sun. You could go a lot farther at lower speeds (20 miles on an hour of charge if you only went 50 mph) If you actually hit Tesla's efficiency, that would increase to a little over 24 miles. So it goes like this: Your car sat in the sun while you were out shopping at a store 5 miles away. After doing groceries and odds and ends, you arrive home two hours later and your car generated twice the electricity it used and is charged better than when you left.
You could work 30 miles away from home, and your car would, even if you started out with a nearly dead battery at the beginning of the week, drive you to work and back every day at highway speeds, and then on top of that generate enough surplus power to fully charge the batteries and be ready for a 300 mile week end trip.
It would generate so much power that most people would have uninhibited driving, at the same time they plug their home into the car and live totally off grid.
The only thing your car would not be able to do is a 1200 mile grind, which I have done a couple times in my life. But the kind of power that it could generate on it's own would add up to about 30,000 miles per year, which is more than double an average American drives in a year.
Unlike a gasoline powered car, city driving with an electric car would use less energy per mile than highway driving if it had proper regenerative design. So it would be at it's best where people would use it most.
All of this is based on 22.5 percent efficiency from a dirt cheap solar panel design made in America approximately a decade before anyone expected such a panel to be made. This new solar panel from Solar City is the first product from that company, and it really makes the dream of 30 percent efficiency from a cheap panel look like a relevant prospect. If 30 percent efficiency is achieved, it will hit the barrier where even a heavy car can be pushed at 50 mph with no charge in the batteries at all. Tesla's equations are for higher speed use, if you only wanted to plod along at 40 mph, even the current panels could push something like a Honda Oddyssey at close to 40 mph for as long as the sun was up.
HERE IS THE MATH THAT PROVES IT WITH WORST CASE SCENARIOS:
This is worst case scenario math, for converting normal cars over to electric - cars that are not designed for electric, and not just a dream:
Let's use my example - the Honda Odyssey, a hateable and loveable behemoth, perhaps the biggest mommy van on the road. The Odyssey weighs 4,396 pounds. Hardly a practical weight for a solar car.
Probable worst case scenario.
It is six feet seven inches wide. It is 17 feet long. That would allow your solar panels to be seven full feet wide, and 18.5 feet long with little overhang. Approximately 130 square feet. That is an advantage I guess, but what do you expect on something that huge?
During peak, the sun will deliver 1000 watts per square yard. A square yard is 9 square feet. you would have 14.444 square yards of panel. That would be 14,444 watts of sun power delivered. Times 30 percent efficiency from the panels, for 4,333 watts delivered continuously. A horsepower is 746 watts. Take 4,333 and divide it by that. You have 5.808 horsepower continuous to work with.
Use the Ecomodder calculator to see this. Enter a drag coefficient of 0.25 and a weight of 4390 pounds and leave the rest of the numbers where they are, because they are averages and I don't have all the specs for the Odyssey. A chart that shows watt equivalent will come up below the calculator. There you will see the Odyssey really would be able to go 40 mph with solar panels alone, and a dead battery. It is an exponential curve, so do not expect more. But plodding along at 40 with no fuel and a dead battery in a Honda Odyssey is a relative fantasy concept, no one would have thought that would ever be possible, but even today, close to that is possible (because the exponential power requirement curve puts 22.5 percent efficiency and 30 percent efficiency relatively close as far as how fast it would go.)
This is also why, for practical use you figure 10 miles per hour of charge rather than 40, when you could go 40 miles on an hour of charge if you drove like a tree hugger. But no one is a tree hugger, RIGHT? Reality: you go 80 mph when possible.
My equations above are for practical use, the way Americans actually drive. If even a Honda Odyssey could be converted to a usable solar car RIGHT NOW, A practical solar car everyone would love really is possible and would be affordable, RIGHT NOW.
Obviously if you took the worst case scenario - an Odyssey, and modified it to be lighter, the results would be better.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/215555-0-55-per-watt-from-solarcitys-record-breaking-new-solar-panel