Solar Prius
July 7th, 2008 by john
The internet is buzzing this morning with a report from the Nikkei business daily newspaper in Japan that Toyota plans to add solar panels to the next generation Prius, in addition to its plug-in capability.
Most of the comments seem to be skeptical of the amount of value adding the panels can bring, but Canadian engineer Steve Lapp can provide actual data since he modified his 2001 Prius back in 2005 to include solar panels on the roof. His initial three panel system generated around 270W, but he was hoping to boost that to 360W with the addition of a fourth panel.
Air Conditioning?
The reports from the Nikkei paper suggest that Toyota’s intention here is to be able to help run the A/C in the car using solar power, but given Steve’s data above, they’ll only be able to cover 10%-15% of the power needs of an air conditioning unit.
Perhaps a better use would be to allow those solar panels to charge the batteries all day while the car sits out in the parking lot. Even more interesting though, the next generation Prius is also a plugin hybrid, so having an array of solar panels on the roof would allow all those parked cars to potentially feed solar energy back into the grid through a V2G scheme. A single 300W car might not make much difference, but imagine a parking lot or two of them all feeding into the grid during those peak sunshine hours when our power demand is at its maximum.
[Information about Steve Lapp's solar Prius, and photo via TreeHugger.]
Tags: hybrid, plugin, prius, solar, v2g
Posted in Cars, Energy |
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July 7th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I seriously doubt the production Prius could include anything like 270W of solar, I would actually expect it to be more like 100W and they will probably charge you an extra $1000 for that option (2X the retail price of the cells). Parked in the sun over the day it might give you an extra 1kwh of power - perhaps a savings of $0.20 in power, or $0.50 in gas (at $5/gal and 10kwh per gal efficiency) so it would take a long time to pay back - that will be an expensive green-wash option. Perhaps there will be a reduction of the cost of the option due to federal or state tax incentives and rebates. But if you park your car in a garage and don’t spend much time driving during peak sunlight hours then you’ll actually get much less power out of the solar… My conclusion is that internal solar for cars will not be practical even at 50% cell efficiency and 50% lower costs both of which will be quite a long time coming.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Parking in a garage will certainly make solar panels pretty pointless (unless you always park on the roof!), but there are a large number of people commuting to places more like Sunnyvale than San Francisco, where much of the parking is outdoor, uncovered and in the sun most of the day.
Even at 1kwh per day per car, that could make a typical Sunnyvale office lot quite useful if there were enough of these cars plugged into it. Does it cover the cost of the solar panel over the life of the car? Perhaps not, but do people really buy cars based on how much of a return they get on the investment? And if parking lots reserved the best spaces for solar cars that feed back into the grid during the day.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[...] given the size of the Elise’s roof panel, and the information about Toyota’s plans for solar panels in their next generation Prius, I imagine it is not much [...]