Dont be fooled!

The birth of the first solar panel on a mainstream production vehicle will be the next generation Toyota Prius due out next Spring. Nissan, VW and several other carmakers will offer solar panels on their electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles also. One solar roof panel will only provide a small percentage of the power that todays electric vehicles require. At 20% efficiency (Suniva and Day4 Energy), a solar roof panel could generate up to 270 watts. The panel will be optional and cost under $900. Keep in mind, the cost of solar panels will gradually come down, and the efficiency will gradually go up. Already, there are cheaper and more efficient solar panels being announced. The SunFlake panel, invented by Martin Aagesen who is a PhD from the Nano-Science Center and the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen, gets 30% efficiency and will be cheaper than current panels. Innovalight claims they have a solar panel that is 44% efficient at one tenth the cost. If that’s true we will be over 500 watts. The next technology, coming 5 to 10 years from now, is infrared solar and solar paint, that will collect radiant heat from the entire vehicle body, 24 hours a day. This too has the potential to double the wattage again, but from twice the surface area. So we will be up to 2000 watts under ideal conditions (less depending on the angle of the sun and weather conditions).

Recently, Toyota described the 1/X Concept vehicle, a plug-in hybrid about the size of a Prius, but ONE THIRD the weight, only 926 lbs. With a vehicle that is one third the weight, the mileage doubles from the same wattage. Quantum Sphere announced a breakthrough in their lithium ion batteries that produces FOUR TIMES the capacity from the same size cell. Another breakthrough is an electric motor that uses HALF the amount of energy to perform the same amount of work. With this new electric motor, the mileage doubles again. Search: Thor Power: Revolutionary Electric Motor Design Cuts Energy Use in Half. And with that 2000 watts of solar power, we will not be powering the vehicle motor. We will be powering a generator to pulse charge a pack of individual batteries in rapid succession with a pulse width modulator, many times per second. Such a battery charger is being patented. However, researchers can not explain how one battery running a generator can charge a half a dozen other batteries, but they see it happening.

A large percentage of the coming electric and plug in hybrid vehicles will be charged at night when the rates are low, then driven to work and parked all day. If you live in a sunny location, the big pay-off will be Vehicle to Grid (V2G). This concept was originally conceived to transfer a portion of cheap off peak power from your batteries into the daytime peak load grid. You would drive to work, park your car at a V2G receptacle, plug in and tell your car how much power to sell to the grid. Then when you got off work, you would have enough juice left to get home. With advanced technology in a sunny climate, and 2000 additional watts of power to feed into the grid at peak load rates, you would get a lot of credits on your electric bill. All of this will eventually become a standard feature financed into the vehicle, and it will pay for itself. As a last resort, if you ever needed to charge your vehicle away from home, or on a rainy day, you would plug into the V2G system and charge your batteries. The power will go both ways. Feed electric power into the local grid for a credit, or draw power out as a debit on your electric bill.

Solar panels, solar glass and solar bodies on vehicles using V2G will soon power your vehicle and the grid. Visualize whole parking lots of solar equipped electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, capable of feeding the grid, charging, or generating power on the fly. The vehicles of the future will be portable power plants, and we will be managing energy.