On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Ivan Menchero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
> > > BTW how come the electric vehicle do not have solar panels on their roof? > prize? AC/DC problems? > > > Ivan > - > It's mostly because of power density. An average car, with current solar panel efficiencies, and average electric car efficiencies for a 3000lb car, would get an extra two or three miles a day of extra range from the solar panels on the roof. A large van, maybe two miles a day extra range. It's alot more effective to put the solar panels on the roof of the garage, where you can have alot more area (and not worry about them adding weight to the car, though that's not really that much anyway) and then you can actually have a large enough solar array to provide 30 to 100 miles of range per day of sun -- grid tie the solar array, then charge the car at night from the grid (if the utility will allow that). Average car -- between 250 and 350 watt hours per mile (up to 500 to 800 watt hours per mile for larger vans/trucks). Average power density of a top of the line commercially available solar panel (Sunpower) is about 15 watts per square foot (in full sun -- flat mounted panels on a car roof will be less due to poor sun angle depending on latitude and time of year). If we have 15 square feet of roof area on the car covered, that's only about 200 watts, and assuming a conservative 4 equivalent full sun hours per day, that's 800 watt hours before losses. 80% efficiency of all the electronics round trip is decent, which leaves us with about 650 watts hours per day collected -- about two to three miles of range. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20091017/19a87abe/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
