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Building one's own solar panels is far cheaper than having them installed by professionals on one's roof.

 

i would think so, but much harder too.

 

Maybe half the price, at best?

Fixed solar panels are operating and harvesting all daylight time, every day. A portable system carried inside the car will be harvesting only when you have it set up. If much less than half-time, portable payback will take longer than fixed-system payback.

Yes, but not huge.

Once the frame is made strong enough to withstand common wind gusts, and anchored well enough to not get blown around and damage itself or other vehicles in the parking lot, it isn't going to be so thin and light.

 

A current fad is solar panels on yachts. Since they sit parked a lot of the time, maybe makes some sense there. Lots more surface area than a car too.

 

If you are in a PG&E service area, then you are saddled with PG&E rates that have punitive pricing that prevents the use of the grid to charge your car from 3 PM to 11 PM every day. Even when the power is plentiful and virtually free, PG&E will charge you in excess of 55 cents per kWh. Yes, that makes it hard to recover your investments.

That does not compare with the use of home solar to charge your car. That should be a pretty fast return on investment.

 

Duh!

For grid capacity and stability reasons, if you charge from the grid instead of from your own home solar, in any Time-Of-Use utility area, it should be from midnight to 7 a.m. If that isn't long enough, then the rest of the morning is next-best. Don't charge during the afternoon when everyone is using peak AC, unless you want to play into the hands of the EV disparagers complaining EVs overloading the grid.

 

I suppose. And you're probably right. Sadly, it seems ANY diy solution to making an EV work for a person is always met with "not worth the effort." I'm sure I did a lot of "not worth the effort" things with my previous cars, like when I rebuilt the engine on the VW Beetle. But then there are Youtube videos like these.

Then again, I digress. As many, many, many forum members of many, many, many forums have pointed out, just about any modification to an EV to try to extend its range are not worth the effort. Instead of buying a cheap Nissan Leaf with a low capacity battery and trying to swap in a 40kWh battery, or adding solar, or adding a second battery, or a range extender, etc., it's just more logical to put the money towards a used Tesla instead.

That may depend where you live. I don't have A/C, and pretty much the entire town doesn't have A/C. I knew one guy that got A/C, but then ended up selling or giving it away, because he doesn't have it anymore. It's just too cool of an environment here to need it.

But come winter time and a lot of people will be using electric heaters, and a lot of them use them at night and early morning when the temperature dips down.

 

While this is true of most of the country in august, it is not for california where dbstoo lives. Because of the large solar subsidies, imports and natural gas go down between 7am and 6 pm. Wind and solar provide enough power that even in increased demand, demand for natural gas and imported electricity goes down.

This has a chart from april and some of the causes of high prices. I don't agree with all the opinion. Building more natural gas ccgt plants, importing less power, and mothballing or reclaiming less efficient power plants would add to grid reliability and lower prices.
A Golden Age of Renewables Is Beginning, and California Is Leading the Way | Scientific American

California imports a lot of its power, and PG&E and SCE have mismanaged their power plants and infrastrucure so that is passed on to california consumers. Infrastructure is not there in california and this and incompetance causes the high rates. My bet would be that rates would be much lower if PG&E had been allowed to go bankrupt after the incompance of poorly maintained lines destroying lives, ecosystems, and property with the fires.

 

"... FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY ..."

That is a long long long way from meeting federal new passenger car requirements.

I don't live under a TOU rate system. At least, not yet.

You mentioned PG&E, so I skimmed their particular TOU rate structure and time windows. And service map. While you may live up in a cool-weather portion of their service territory, it appears that a very large majority of their customer and load base is in hot AC-dominated zones, hence their TOU schedule for their whole system. The time of day you plug in an EV is relevant to their overall system, no matter where in their system you are located.

Numerous folks disparaging EVs ask what will happen when everyone gets home and plugs in to start charging at 5 pm on those hot August days. The normal response from EV supporters is that home charging will be delayed until that peak AC load has wound down for evening, using the built-in charge timers, with TOU rates providing the incentives.

That is what we used to do here in the relatively mild climate of the Pacific Northwest too, especially in all-electric neighborhoods lacking natural gas service. But now we have mostly converted to much more efficient heat pumps. With your much higher electric cost, pressure to convert electric resistance heat to heat pumps is much stronger.

I would hope that PG&E's TOU rate timeslots get adjusted to reflect supply and demand changes. While one of PG&E's schedules has "off peak" ending at 7 am, another extends "off peak" all the way out to 3 pm, with "peak" going from 4 pm to 9 pm, consistent with the Main Grid demand pattern in that SciAm article. One of the business schedules even has a "super off-peak" rate from 9 am to 2 pm.

PG&E rates: Electric Vehicles

 

The point was that the concept of putting solar panels behind a vehicle can charge it. That was my original idea, put a trailer full of solar panels behind the Leaf and charge anywhere the sun shines. But again, it isn't worth it. There's no point in modding an EV in any way, shape or form. There are sections I drive that are some 200 miles between charging stations, and we have bitter winters. I just need to wait until I can afford some EV that can do that kind of mileage in the middle of winter, or wait for more charging stations.

Nor do I. The rate is flat every day, all year long. But there's no harm in harvesting electricity when it's at its lowest demand.

 

Most DIY solutions will deliver level 1 charging. When you add the weight of the equipment (which shortens your range), it isn’t worthwhile for any highway legal vehicle.

There are lots of modding people have done to EVs.
Just not in the efficiency area.
The manufacturers have the design chops and scale of production that makes them difficult to beat as a DIY solution.

Reminds me a bit of the guy that tried installing mini wind mills on his car to try to improve range.

 

The good news is that EV's are coming down in price. I can get a Tesla Model 3 long range AWD with 50k miles and zero reported accidents for about $16,000, the same as what the Avalon had cost me. And the insurance would be around the same price too.

 

I can go 32-34 miles locally in my Prime on $2 or less of PGE electricity. My rate stays the same all the time. Here is where Calif gets its electricity. I get the Prime’s electricity free.
What Are The Top Energy Sources in California? « Electric Rate

 

Also few trees out at sea.

 

wow! what year is that?

 

It looks like the one I was looking at has already sold. I don't see it anymore. But there is a Standard Range Plus RWD for around the same price from 2021, and for a grand more or so I can get a 2020 AWD Long Range.

 

that's amazing. are they in colorado? i'm still not seeing any deals around here.

 

not even close:

carvana > filters

hertz > used-tesla.htm

 

My mistake, it was dbstoo that mentioned PG&E and "punitive" TOU rate schedule.

 

The one I was looking at before was within driving distance here in Colorado, right on the Tesla website. The price was $24,000 before credits. It looks like I might have jumped the gun in calculating the actual price since I thought there was a used Colorado EV rebate that I was elegible for, but apparently not. Still, $20,000 for a used, long range Tesla with less than 50k miles is getting pretty good.