The story is that a company, Solar Electrical Vehicles, has developed a solar panel based charging system for hybrid vehicles. This causes dancing visions of being able to drive for free, anywhere you want, thumb your nose at OPEC, because the Sun powers your life.
Well, there is actually very little power you can generate with a panel the size of a car's roof. The article says the panels in use are rated for 300 watts or so. Consider that the battery pack required to move a car a significant distance would have to be 10 kilowatt-hours in size, or larger. Therefore a 300 watt panel would take 30 hours of ideal sunlight conditions to charge the battery pack. Hurm.
Still, it looks cool and would give great bragging rights. But you'd do better to spend your money on a home charging station to have a stationary battery back from which you charge your car.
0 comments:
Post a Comment