Featured Elon Musk’s big lie about Tesla is finally exposed

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. 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 goes down.

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.