Hi, my name is Joseph Lado and I drive an electric car that has solar panels on the front hood and rear deck of the vehicle. Even though solar panels on my electric car are not enough to power the vehicle they demonstrate clearly the connection between solar panel photovoltaic cells and electric vehicle transportation. The concept is called PV2EV.
I know most of you know this but the beauty of photovoltaic cells is that they turn sunlight energy directly into electric energy. They don’t have to turn the sunlight energy into thermal energy to heat water to a boil and then send the steam through a turbine that spins a generator that produces electricity. That is solar thermal. Photovoltaic solar cells work by having the photons of sunlight smash into the loosely held electrons at the top of the solar cell causing the electrons to come loose. They accumulate in the conductor wires and flow through the circuit wires through an electric device such as a light bulb or a motor and then travel back to the cell where the electrons are gathered up ready to be smacked again by rays of sunlight and do the trip through the circuit again.
The most common solar panels we see on rooftops are typically made up of these photovoltaic cells. Often times people when thinking about purchasing solar panels for their homes are thinking of displacing the electricity that comes from the utility company. When they consider the cost of solar panels over the cost of electricity from the utility, they realize that solar panels will typically only pay for themselves over the life of the home. Solar panels for producing your household electricity is like purchasing your electricity with a long term loan as compared to using utility electricity, which is more like renting. You will simply never own it. A solar paneled home should have a much greater resale value since the new home owners will be purchasing their electricity with the home price rather than having to rent it from the utility. Solar panels for displacing utility electricity is a good idea, just not a really great idea. That is until you think of solar panels in conjunction with electric cars.
When you use the electricity produced from solar panels to charge up an electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid you are displacing gasoline instead of utility electricity. Gasoline is more expensive than utility electricity; therefore for every gallon of gasoline that you don’t use the cost of that gallon of gasoline goes towards the cost of having purchased the solar panels. Let me put this in a different way. When you are using the electricity from your solar panels to displace utility electricity it is kind of like a one to one replacement. In the end it is a good idea because it increases the value of your home, but it costs the same for solar panels as it does to purchase utility electricity over the life of the loan. But, when you use the electricity produced by the solar panels to replace what you would have spent on gasoline it is typically something like a 2 and ½ times replacement. So, for every gallon equivalent of electricity you get from your solar panels keeps you from having to have spent that money on gasoline, so the savings goes towards the cost of what you paid for the solar panels. If it took 20 years to pay off a solar panel array displacing utility electricity and a gallon of gasoline was 2 and a half times the price of electricity then the solar panels used for charging up an electric car instead would pay for themselves in only 8 years time. This much faster return on investment really should make people pause and think. If electricity is cheap and gasoline is expensive, then solar panels coupled with electric cars begin to not just look like a good idea, but in fact it begins to look like a really great idea. If the price of gasoline begins to climb, the PV2EV idea begins to look fantastic. After the 8 years are up your fuel for the electric car is in essence free. While everyone else is suffering under the weight of having to come up with more and more money to pay for their gasoline addiction, you will be clean and sober. Your electric fuel is already paid for or its cost before the 8 years is up to you is fixed. You don’t have to worry.
Oh, yea. I forgot to mention that solar panels don’t emit carbon, make no noise and have no moving parts so they are virtually maintenance free, and I also forgot to mention that electric cars are quiet, clean, have very low maintenance costs associated with them and emit nothing, zero, zilch, nada. There is also all that stuff about not funding both sides of the war on terror, national security, clean renewable energy, stable energy prices, which means a more stable economy and stuff like that. For now you can be happy for one thing, that the PV2EV idea is a sound personal economic decision. (You see that? I turned "it is a great idea" into something that sounds prudent, which it is, but it is a fantastically prudent idea dude).
So there you have it.
Sincerely,
Joe Lado
Host of the Power Hour that broadcast every Thursday night at 9 pm Eastern Time on EVcast.com.
This blog was originally published on EVWorld.com