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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