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Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels
(www.popsci.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Pretty sure these solar panels aren't just your regular residential or commercial building panels. They are specially made for this purpose.
Those don't exist.
Amount of power that can be generated is dictated by the angle to the Sun. You need to be perpendicular. Panels on the ground can slowly move and rotate to kind of track the sun. Or you put a bunch of mirrors and make a tower made of solar panels.
Solar panels on roof tend to be fixed infrastructure. You get what you get.
So if they apply panels to a vehicle you have two options. Flat or angled.
If they're flat and the only time you're ever going to get the maximum amount of power from them is during noon when the sun is directly above your vehicle. If angled that means the height of the vehicle has changed and they direction that they work is very dictated. If they track the Sun then they're probably going to waste more power than they can ever produce by constantly moving because you're on a vehicle that's constantly moving.
No one said it does.
While they could do things to mitigate the angle of incidence, ultimately that same photovoltaic material will fare better angled consistently toward where the sun might be. If you've run out of room everywhere else, sure, time to look at trailers. But so long as we have spare other places, those are better places.
The trailer might be going through shaded areas, there's only so much optics can do to correct for angle of incidence, and the added weight means we are using energy to move them around when they'd be better off stationary anyway.
Even residential solar is a dubious proposition, since you have to work around roof lines that are rarely optimal for solar. In that case it can make some sense for owning your own generation, particularly with battery, to go "off grid", but I have a hard time imagining similar for the trailer.
Thing is, we're no where close to running out of room. There's lots of land to use. I cannot speak for every country, but the US for sure has vast areas of nothing. A truck stop with a solar array nearby storing it for when the trucks stop buy to me makes way more sense to me at least.
Depends on how much power you can efficiently harness I'd imagine
A 220 watt solar panel will somewhat efficiently charge a 12v battery on a clear day
An electric car uses about an 800v battery(s) which is about 67 normal batteries. Let's go ahead and say a small truck would take twice that and hey to make it a round number let's call it 2000v. That means you would need a solar panel that can produce 440,000 watts or .44 Megawatts.
Some Google fu shows that to harness an entire megawatt(1 million watts) you'd need about 5000 conventional solar panels which on the ground would take up about 5-10 acres. Pretty impractical to put half that on the back of a truck I'd say.
You'd have to have some extremely efficient solar panels to make it practical methinks. Might work on smaller cars though. Anyone feel free to jump in here and get me with an epic slam though
Yeah, it certainly seems like a challenge. I'll be interested in seeing where they go with it.
This you?
Ah yes. The old "this isn't an optimal solution that will solve all problems so no one should be working on it"-argument. You must be fun at parties.
Listen this isn't mixing drinks or some opinion piece were there's no one clear way. Things cost money. Every company that would seek to implement this is going to be looking at an ROI. Suboptimal numbers is going to make the project look bad and waste a bunch of money. Sorry if I'm 'not fun' because I'd rather have functional solar power than the appearance of solar power.