Friday, October 3, 2008

Why no Solar Cars?

Are Solar Cars figments of imagination or science thriller stuffs?

I have made a back of the hand calculation about running cars on solar power.

A gallon of gas is 115,000BTUs or 34kwh(3413 BTUs=1kWh). Running at 60mph,the car consumes gas at 3 gallons per hour. Efficiency of combustion engines is around 15% so, the energy required by a car is roughly 34*3*0.15 kwh ~ 15kwh.

The peak rate of incident solar energy ~ 1kW/sq m. The surface area for solar cells on cars ~6 feet*3 feet~1 sq m. So solar energy incident is 1kW*3600=3600kwh. So at this rate the minimum efficiency of a solar cell required is 0.42%. The current efficiency of cheap solar cells is much more than this.

This may seem surprising, but there are many assumptions in this calculation.
The actual area will be much much less.

For a realistic advanced solar cell, http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/solar/en/downloads/gepvp200_datasheet_600.pdf the peak power is 200watt with an area of 1.4 sq m or 140 w/sq m. So energy delivered by this solar cell 504 kwh/sqm

It seems that even with the current technology we can have cars running entirely on solar power. I am amazed that there are no cars as such!!!!!


PS: 1) I think apart from the solar cells, the storage of solar power is difficult which contributes to the problem

2) Rather than mounting ugly solar panels on cars. The cars can run on batteries which can be charged at solar charging stations akin to our gas pumps. The charging stations can have huge panels to harvest solar power.

3) Wind/night/rain might be a problem. But at least they can run on solar power during the day according to my analysis