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A comment on Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge battery during the day. Parent comment

Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by jartelt on Friday September 13, 2019 @10:31AM (#20962490)
The amount of power incident from the sun is roughly 1000 W/m^2 in a sunny area. Good Silicon PV panels will capture 20% of that power generating 200 W/m^2 at peak. Getting anything more than that is going to be too expensive for a car application.

Pulling 600 W/m^2 from a PV panel may be theoretically possible, but the world record efficiency for a PV device is still less than 50%. To get above 40% efficiency you need to use very expensive multijunction devices and solar concentrators (i.e. not going to work on a car).

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by Retric on Friday September 13, 2019 @02:46PM (#20965112)
I generally agree today, but that says little about the long term.

As solar panels have gotten cheaper installation costs have become more important which has pushed up panel efficiency. Cheap but good panels are up to ~23% efficiency where they where ~18% fairly recently. What’s interesting is these trends seem to be continuing with serious research into various affordable multi junction cells going on.

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