It wouldn’t be the solar panels recharging the vehicle. It would be batteries. The solar panels are there to recharge the batteries. I also don’t believe that would be enough, the batteries are likely recharged using the power grid.
I’m skeptical. The cost of buying & maintaining batteries capable of quick-charging multiple EVs would be significant. It would probably make more sense to use the solar cells to augment power from the grid when charging vehicles, or to feed their output into the grid when no vehicle is being charged.
This is what my friends with solar panels do. They might have a modest battery for backup during a power outage. But day to day, they rely on net metering. They power their cars and lights and fridges from the grid, and feed whatever energy their roof produces back into the grid. As I mentioned upthread, i have several friends whose roofs produce more power than they use, and who have stopped paying electric bills since installing solar panels.
It’s absolutely feasible to power an electric car plus the rest of your house on solar energy in the northern US if your roof points the right direction and isn’t obscured by trees and stuff.
In summer, maybe. If she has a giant installation. Ask your friend how much power her house is generating in December and January.
Here in Alberta, utility scale solar produced 6.6% of its capacity in December. Rooftop solar was much worse.
My friend in Chicago just sent me a graph of his power useage/generation for the last year, hang on, let me look at his numbers…
In January, February, and December, he imported more power than he exported. In every other month of 2022, he exported more than he imported. Over the course of the year, he exported significantly more power than he imported.
Even in the middle of the winter, his roof was able to send a lot of power to his backup battery (and he did have a brief power outage last year, which he didn’t notice until it had been resolved.)
Is solar a complete answer to energy needs in the north? No. And my guess is my friend heats with some fossil fuel, although I haven’t asked. But can it power your car, and then some? Yes. Can it power your Tesla and your summer AC? Yes. Can it pay for itself over some reasonable amount of time in the right setting, in the northern US, given net power metering? Yes.
My house isn’t well-situated for solar, but I’m jealous of my many friends who have install it.
Meanwhile, heat pumps laugh and say “Only 100% efficient? Amateur.”
I see this misapprehension being stated over and over again which comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between efficiency and efficacy. No thermodynamic or mechanical system can ever be 100% efficient (even resistive heating has some slight losses when considering the conversion to heat), and a heat pump has the losses that are typical to any refrigeration cycle. A heat pump functions by concentrating and transferring thermal energy from an essentially infinite low temperature reservoir (TC, i.e. the ground or outside air) into a high temperature reservoir (TH) by using compression and expansion of a working fluid to decrease the temperature of the fluid below TC on the outside and above TH on the inside. Done correctly, this results in transferring more thermal energy from low to high than the mechanical work done to compress the fluid and all thermodynamic losses in the pump cycle, which gives an efficacy > 1 but the efficiency of the thermodynamic cycle is still limited by inevitable losses. If this were truly a closed cycle, i.e. the low temperature reservoir were not effectively infinite, the cycle wouldn’t work, hence why you can’t just put your air conditioner in the middle of the room and expect to get net cooling.
Stranger
But it isn’t a closed system, it’s real world. If spending 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity in a heat pump makes your house warmer than spending it in resistive heating, go for it.
Please consider this :
Suppose you and neighbor come to this agreement : Your neighbor gets a contract with a transport company that provides her family transportation, but she wants you to buy a car and maintain it and keep it ready for your neighbor’s use, anytime the transport company is not around - no exceptions!
That’s what Net metering translates to.
So assume there are 1000 homes, each needing 1 kW, so the total power needed is 1000 kW. Now suppose half of the homes are rich and install solar power. So the rich want the poor people to maintain a 500 kW power plant to power the poor but want the poor to keep another 500 kW power plant ready and on the go (pay for its upkeep and infrastructure), whenever the rich need it !! Some say that is not fair on the poor !!
BTW : Biden has addressed this issue in the latest IRA (Inflation Reduction Act). Essentially, for most Solar and Wind : a 50% credit is issued (in very general simplified terms). So if you setup a 100MW solar farm, you can claim credit for 50MW “green energy” generation.
IMO : All fixed costs for setting up the power infrastructure : capital costs, maintenance, setting and maintaining the grid, etc. should be borne equally by all users. Then net metering makes sense.
If everyone used the same amount all the time, your analogy might work. But they don’t. And utilities need to build out to the maximum use, not the average use. The power draw depends on the weather, and it’s highest when it’s hot and sunny. I suspect that the mushrooming of rooftop solar panels in my area is related to our utilities not having needed to increase their capacity recently. In fact, they’ve had a modest decrease in maximum draw, which has been heavily subsidized by those rich people, who are paying up-front to increase the total capacity of the local electrical grid.
The poor people who are still paying for power have more reliable power at lower cost, as a result of the infrastructure the rich people have funded. That’s not a terrible tradeoff.
Your perspective is valid too - and many states have gone with that rationality too. It depends on the voters though ultimately, Many states have put limits on “Net metering” and many do not allow it all together
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If the power company puts up power lines to power me and my neighbor., they expect to recover their costs in 2-5 years. If my neighbor doesn’t pay much, the power company recovers its investment from me. A majority of states get this and have thus put limits on net metering.
It is also relevant to point out here that roads and infrastructure budgets (maintenance and new) come from taxation on gasoline and diesel. Now EVs do not pay any transportation taxes : so effectively they are not paying for the roads/bridges. That’s going to change too.
Also relevant is the failure of Solar Power in Spain. There are lots of lessons learned that can be used for the success of renewable power in the US :
https://blog.abacoadvisers.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-solar-energy-in-spain/
This is not true. In many states EVs and plugin hybrids pay extra taxes at registration time, typically in the range of $50-200.
You are right. I should have said Federal taxes. We do not pay any additional registration taxes on our Tesla X in Texas (yet) but many other states require it :
“Thirty-one states have laws requiring a special registration fee for plug-in electric vehicles. Of those, 18 states also assess a fee on plug-in hybrid vehicles. These fees are typically in addition to traditional motor vehicle registration fees.” - https://www.ncsl.org/energy/special-fees-on-plug-in-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles
Highest demand is typically early morning and evening when people get up for and come home from work. The peaks are usually even and highest in the hot summer and cold winter. While a little solar does come online in summer during peak hours it is small, in winter it’s basically zero. So unless there is a good way to store daytime power, solar is not saving us from building other power plants as we need to have them to meet peak demand.
As mentioned the way it is structured in many states the solar owner is basically getting a free ride as their neighbors are paying their bill. This tide seems to be turning however and the actual value of the solar production is in the area of 25% of what the solar owner is actually getting for it in these areas where they can pay the utility kWh for kWh instead of in dollars.
Serious question: what is driving that demand? Light bulbs have gotten cheap. I would have assumed the major electrical items these days are
AC
Stove
Fridge
Hot water
Microwave and similar kitchen appliances.
Only the hot water is high in the morning.
And news items make me think that most surges in power demand are caused by AC, which peaks late afternoon. (Or certainly can in homes that have solar panels.)
The highest electrical demand is in the summer and is driven mostly by air conditioning. This is mostly an issue in the Northeastern U.S. The rest of the country isn’t as overloaded in the summer, generally speaking, though the Southwestern grid is a bit strained at peak as well. A lot of work has been done to prevent local overloading from cascading into large scale power outages, especially in the Northeast (where the last couple of major cascade failures have occurred).
Experts say that grid improvements and improvements in protective equipment have made the system immune to major cascade failures, which is exactly what they said prior to the 2003 cascade failure. Make of that what you will.
Texas has major issues in winter, but that’s because their systems were not designed for the extreme cold weather that they have experienced in recent years.
In the north, AC isn’t an issue. The surge in demand somes as people turn on all the lights, turn up the heat, make breakfast, shower, etc. Electric ranges use a lot of power, and lots of people cook large breakfasts. If you have an electric water heater/boiler, those morning showers put it to work. Electric cars pre-heat the battery and interior off of house mains before you go to work, and get plugged in to charge when you get home. Offices and businesses open, and often trigger temperature increases. And so on. The first and last hours of the working day are a flurry of activity.
Here is a actual result that shows what happens around supper time in winter when solar is offline:
The pool price is the price paid when importing gas. As you can see, it jumped from $75/MW to about $650/MW during the 4pm-7pm rush. And that was while wind was producing at 50% of capacity, which is about as high as it goes around here.
People who are actually saving money from solar are probably doing so because they have a deal like Alberta’s where you can bank credit for any power you generate during the day, then use the credit for power later. But since there is no storage of power, what happens is that the power provider has to sell your power at a pool price of $75 maybe, then give it back toyou at their expense when the pool price is ten times higher. To do this, all the other rate payers are charged fees.
This is not scalable. It only works when a small percentage of people have solar systems. If we add much more solar here, for example, the pool price will go to zero or even negative during sunny days, while we have to maintain just as much natural gas infrastructure to replace solar when the sun isn’t shining.
Living in Sweden, I find this statement to be totally false, at least regarding Sweden and Germany. Every SP company in Sweden has a very, very long waiting list of customers, that aren’t getting their panels due to supply chain issues. Maybe you think they are idiots who can’t do the math. I assure you that they are not. It will take longer to pay for them, as compared to southern Europe but it’s still a very good deal.
As for Germany:
About 1.5 million photovoltaic systems were installed around the country in 2014
I guess they can’t count either.
Or do you mean that we’re switching all our energy production to solar? Because of course not. Wind makes up a a large chunk, as does nuclear, hydro and (to a lesser extent every day) fossil. Denmark currently get about 40% of their total energy production from wind. Yeah, I’m mixing apples and oranges but I want to point out that we’re really, really gong places with renewables in our part of the world. Solar is part of the mix. Will it power our giant new hydrogen based steel forge in the far north? No. But for individual homes it’s very much a viable option at quite high latitudes, whatever our resident Canadian says.
ETA: Forgot the link
To see how bad solar power is in the north in winter, here is the December chart:
The solid purple line and the area below it represents solar capacity. That’s what gets advertised when you see, “New 50 MW solar plant opens, which will power 5,000 homes!” It’s also the number they use when comparing the cost of solar to other energy.
The dark purple spikes are the actual solar power produced: 5.88% of capacity. Also notice the pool price spikes. What little solar power we make is made when prices are lower. And look how much we had to pay for energy in December because we have over-invested in solar.
Back to the point in the OP: at least in winter, you won’t be charging your car with solar. The solar panels sized to cover a charging station will produce very little power.
Well, they can be lied to, and they can be incentivized with government handouts other people will be forced to pay.
Installing hamster wheels to generate power makes sense if the government pays you $1,000 per wheel to do it. It doesn’t make it rational for the government to do so.
For example:
They should say that the capacity in Germany is more like 20% of that number annually, and 5% of it in the middle of winter. Less when talking about rooftop solar, which is even less efficient.
After all this solar power in Germany, their coal use is increasing and their greenhouse gas emissions are going up. GHG emissions went up 4.5% in 2021, before the war in Ukraine.