Please don't take my response as "soundly engineered". It is just a starting point. You will be over $10k, approaching $20k by the time you account for everything to make it work.
Also, DC charging doesn't help, even if the protocol to initiate it was public and EVSE's existed to do it. DC charge voltage on the spark is 400 V, with solar panels typically producing 25-30 V each, you are looking at maybe 16 panels in series just to get to the required voltage. The DC fast charge power is 50 kW... forget doing that with solar.
Can a car cary enough solar panels / Can solar panels carry enough to charge an electric car?
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I'm a long way above my paygrade on the biophysics and material science being tossed around in that sentence; but it sounds to me -- and its just my opinion --- that what's going on there is apples and oranges.Leave a comment:
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You have experience with a battery maintainer panel, not a battery charging panel. The scale of what you are thinking about goes far beyond that application in terms of cost, area, maintenance, etc.
It also assumes, of course, that you only want to charge the car for a few hours before and after solar noon.
As long as you recognize the limitations of what you want to do AND that each kWh of power that you get from solar will likely cost you more than the same power from POCO, then we can keep on exploring.
But the amount of power that you will need is comparable to what would be produced by a small (maybe 3kW) grid tie system. If you cannot afford grid tie you certainly cannot afford the alternatives.
The distinction between maintaining and charging gets a little blurry with these cars. They're not the same as gas and Diesel; with your gas rig you run the tank down to near the bottom and then you fuel up; what you find when you get one of these all-electric models is that you go out for a run, and even if it's just around the block, you plug it in and top it off every time you get back to the yard. "Fueling" becomes more of a chore, like a regular task, than a cataclysmic event, some big deal, you drive to a gas station or stop at one on the way; hey, I still remember gas lines in 1973. That took HOURS.
I got some good soundly-engineered advice on this very thread that pegs the cost of what I'm thinking of doing at four or five thousand dollars. That's very doable; and there's absolutely no doubt that the next guy who lives in this house is going to be raising kids and the whole nine yards and using a lot of electricity like I used to and that family will make good use of my solar roof supports and who knows, maybe even my solar panels, and will wire it all to the grid and it will all be good. Plan for success. Meantime, I think I'm going to go ahead and plug in just my car to the roof.Leave a comment:
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Spark EV has an 18 kWh battery. A L2 charge is 3.3 kW, which at 240 V is 13.75 A.
To get 3.3 kW peak power from an array, you'll need something like 4000 W of solar panels. That is 14 * 285 W panels. At $1 / W for panels, you are already $4000 into this, and you don't even have an inverter yet, or a way to regulate the panel voltage. Have I gone far enough?Leave a comment:
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They're not likely to get much cheaper. They are currently at under $1/watt if you hunt around a little, and a larger and larger percentage of that isn't for the cell, it's for the encapsulant, aluminum frame, glass, junction box, labor etc.
Photosynthesis tops out at around 2% efficiency; modern (good) panels are up around 18%.Leave a comment:
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(The Efficiency thing is more interesting; some young quantum whizkid at Grinnell or someplace like that is gonna come up with a PV cell tomorrow that's right up there with photosynthesis, you wait and see.)Leave a comment:
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It certainly is possible. I know there are a lot of Volt owners who have solar, and even a couple who are off-grid.
You need a good sized array to get the power required though.Leave a comment:
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Thanks for the well engineered response
Spark EV has an 18 kWh battery. A L2 charge is 3.3 kW, which at 240 V is 13.75 A.
To get 3.3 kW peak power from an array, you'll need something like 4000 W of solar panels. That is 14 * 285 W panels. At $1 / W for panels, you are already $4000 into this, and you don't even have an inverter yet, or a way to regulate the panel voltage. Have I gone far enough?
OTOH I might just do it for the principle of the thing, ie for the fun of it. And thanks for the cogent response; indeed, thanks very much. Much appreciated.Leave a comment:
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You have experience with a battery maintainer panel, not a battery charging panel. The scale of what you are thinking about goes far beyond that application in terms of cost, area, maintenance, etc.
It also assumes, of course, that you only want to charge the car for a few hours before and after solar noon.
As long as you recognize the limitations of what you want to do AND that each kWh of power that you get from solar will likely cost you more than the same power from POCO, then we can keep on exploring.
But the amount of power that you will need is comparable to what would be produced by a small (maybe 3kW) grid tie system. If you cannot afford grid tie you certainly cannot afford the alternatives.Leave a comment:
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Spark EV has an 18 kWh battery. A L2 charge is 3.3 kW, which at 240 V is 13.75 A.
To get 3.3 kW peak power from an array, you'll need something like 4000 W of solar panels. That is 14 * 285 W panels. At $1 / W for panels, you are already $4000 into this, and you don't even have an inverter yet, or a way to regulate the panel voltage. Have I gone far enough?Leave a comment:
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That idea comes up a lot.
"What if I JUST want to charge my car?"
"What if I JUST want to run my air conditioner?"
Unfortunately those are the two biggest users of power out there.
I feel like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes story because it seems like such a dumbass question -- why can't I buy a panel for the roof of the garage that I can just plug the car into?
(we don't use enough electricity to merit investing in PV
The electric car, though, that's interesting; you don't need to get a permit and you don't need the tie-in electronics, right?)Leave a comment:
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I JUSt want to charge the car
Sure if you have means to store the electricity like batteries. However would be extremely foolish to do so. Batteries are extremely expensive and need constant replacement. Battery cost alone, not anything else included wil end up costing you many times more than buying from the POCO. Essentially you win dup paying 5 to 10 morees for power vs buying it. It also makes you a heavy polluter, and waste a lot of resources that could be saved and used later..
Every time I ask about plugging the car into the roof of the garage, people want to tell me about storage batteries and The Grid. I just want to charge the car, the same way I used to keep my Diesel semi trucks' starter batteries trickle-charged back in the day with a modest-sized blanket that went over the great big truck battery boxes. The cute little car already has gigantic expensive storage batteries and an inverter (?) and I already have a J1772 cable to go from 240 to the car.
I feel like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes story because it seems like such a dumbass question -- why can't I buy a panel for the roof of the garage that I can just plug the car into?
(we don't use enough electricity to merit investing in PV, with the grid and all that, like fifty bucks a month ; we already have a great solar thermal setup that's been running for 30 years; and I see some factory-seconds panels at a manufacturer not very far from the house here. The electric car, though, that's interesting; you don't need to get a permit and you don't need the tie-in electronics, right?)Leave a comment:
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Sure if you have means to store the electricity like batteries. However would be extremely foolish to do so. Batteries are extremely expensive and need constant replacement. Battery cost alone, not anything else included wil end up costing you many times more than buying from the POCO. Essentially you win dup paying 5 to 10 morees for power vs buying it. It also makes you a heavy polluter, and waste a lot of resources that could be saved and used later..Leave a comment:
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Only in a grid tie situation. Without batteries to store the electricity for night time use you would have nothing to charge the car. The solar would do nothing.Leave a comment:
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Can a car cary enough solar panels / Can solar panels carry enough to charge an electric car?
Okay so this has been bothering my mind lately. I am a lover of electric cars and solar panels. I think of them going together like peanut butter and jelly. I constantly think of charging electric cars with solar panels.
But more importantly, is it a reality? Is it possible today, let's say you have a 10 kwH solar system and you leave it collecting energy for about 8-9 hours, and this on a typical day, so even though it's 10 kwH I expect to collect around 3 to 4 kwH on a typical cloudy day, and then when you come back home, you charge your electric car until the inverters run out of juice it had been supplied from the sun throughout the day.
So basically, you let your solar panels collect energy when you're at work and then when you come back home, the inverters charge your car until it runs out of juice.
Is this practically possible today, or no? Oh and to be region specific, let's say around the Midwestern United States.
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