My question regards an all electric no frills car for short trips (20-40 miles). See details below.?

Question

My idea is to have a dedicated parking lot with many photovoltaic panels and computer directed charging of user vehicles. Charge the car when at home with a photovoltaic charger, drive to work and plug into the parking lot outlet until the computer determines completion, drive home and plug into your panel again. Drive to the grocery store and open your portable panel and let it charge while you shop or watch a movie. How long would it take to charge a battery under these conditions? Is it feasable?

Answer 1

Just do the calculations. You cannot defy the laws of Math,Physics, and Chemistry. The sun only supplies a very small amount of power each square yard of area. You would probably need a football field size array of hundreds of panels to just charge one car in a short period of time.

Answer 2

Its possible and most probably going to happen in future if only we get clean and good battery technology which many claim already exists (NiMh,Li-Ion)

PV Solar is becoming more and more efficient and current cells give about 15 W/sqft with full sun.

In future we may see most parking lots in sunny regions have PV arrays and car chargers available.

In fact if the efficiency really increases then we may also see panels mounted on car  roofs.

Answer 3

Full noon sun will give you about 1000 w per square meter.

Let's say you can have 2 square meters per car and convert at 25% efficiency.  That will give you 500 watts of power.

1 hp is what, about 746 watts.  A modern car has perhaps 200 hp.

You can quickly see the problem.  There's just not enough power.  Or, it would take you a long time to store a sufficient amount of energy.

Few people realize how much energy is in a gallon of gas.

Answer 4

Electric cars can go 40 miles without recharging.

Once we go nuclear, I would have no problem going electric.  I just don't want to trade gas for coal to power my car.

Answer 5

I believe Chevy is coming out with the Volt in a few years, but it's a plugin hybrid, not charged by solar power, you just plug it into an outlet in your garage.  It takes about 3-6 hours to charge, and you can drive about 40 miles on that charge until the gas engine kicks in.

Dana - solar panels can actually create electricity when it is cloudy out, did you know/?

Answer 6

Those are great questions for EV experts, who do this all the time.  http://www.evdl.org/  

Yes, it's perfectly possible.  And you don't need 200 horsepower of electric motor, because your motor can surge its rating, and a gas engine never achieves its rating.  Heck, the Maniac Mazda has two 28hp motors, and burns an 11.2 second quarter mile!  They're getting just a wee bit more than 56hp out of it, eh?

You will need a BIG solar array.  Now, if your house is on the electric grid, you should grid-tie the solar panel and EV charger.  There are some whopping rebates and incentives for doing that.  Cash in on them, and can sell surplus power back to the grid (i.e. power generated when the car's away) and then draw from the grid at whatever speed your car charges best, no worries about whether the solar panel is producing.

Answer 7

One problem is that this would require a ton of photovoltaic cells.  PVs are expensive - who's going to pay for them?

Another problem is that this won't work on cloudy days or at night (except where it's plugging into the power grid).

It's an interesting idea if somebody would be willing to pay for the PVs.  In California there are already many public charging stations available for electric cars, but they just use the power grid and not solar cells.