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Comment by rand77763 | Hacker News Reader

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rand77763·

There’s a lot of surface area on top of a trailer, just saying.

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30 square meters, laying flat. So maybe 3kW. While the engines need more like 100kW.

You can't effectively power any vehicle with 15% efficient solar panels.

No, but you can improve the range by a few percent.

until you consider the weight of the solar panel

Going with a weight of 20 lbs/m^2, that's only 600 lbs - less than 1% of the fully-loaded weight.

It's fairly likely one could get well below that mass using some of the more experimental solar panel designs (such as those in use for solar aircraft), but it would probably not be cost-efficient .

One note, your second claim is not entirely true - while land vehicles are a ways from being feasible to power with photovoltaics (although I would have to do the math for trains, which may be close), we already have primarily [1] and exclusively [2] solar-powered aircraft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse#Solar_Impulse_2_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Prototype

Those aircraft limp along at a tenth the speed of a typical commercial flight. That's the main reason I said "effectively". I mean, there are useless pure-solar cars too.

Trains might be closer but when single locomotives are measured in megawatts I'm not very confident.

It will be stationary similar to supercharger

What? He meant you could put solar panels on top of a trailer.

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