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Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels
(www.popsci.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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While they could do things to mitigate the angle of incidence, ultimately that same photovoltaic material will fare better angled consistently toward where the sun might be. If you've run out of room everywhere else, sure, time to look at trailers. But so long as we have spare other places, those are better places.
The trailer might be going through shaded areas, there's only so much optics can do to correct for angle of incidence, and the added weight means we are using energy to move them around when they'd be better off stationary anyway.
Even residential solar is a dubious proposition, since you have to work around roof lines that are rarely optimal for solar. In that case it can make some sense for owning your own generation, particularly with battery, to go "off grid", but I have a hard time imagining similar for the trailer.
Depends on how much power you can efficiently harness I'd imagine
A 220 watt solar panel will somewhat efficiently charge a 12v battery on a clear day
An electric car uses about an 800v battery(s) which is about 67 normal batteries. Let's go ahead and say a small truck would take twice that and hey to make it a round number let's call it 2000v. That means you would need a solar panel that can produce 440,000 watts or .44 Megawatts.
Some Google fu shows that to harness an entire megawatt(1 million watts) you'd need about 5000 conventional solar panels which on the ground would take up about 5-10 acres. Pretty impractical to put half that on the back of a truck I'd say.
You'd have to have some extremely efficient solar panels to make it practical methinks. Might work on smaller cars though. Anyone feel free to jump in here and get me with an epic slam though
Thing is, we're no where close to running out of room. There's lots of land to use. I cannot speak for every country, but the US for sure has vast areas of nothing. A truck stop with a solar array nearby storing it for when the trucks stop buy to me makes way more sense to me at least.
Yeah, it certainly seems like a challenge. I'll be interested in seeing where they go with it.