I hope that such a flat roof will be covered in solar
Why do this if it can’t fully charge the ship? To offset the costs of charging the ship at port, to provide longer range by providing a lower voltage power source for 12V DC charging (cell phones, iPads, 5w LED lights).
So the commenter is correct, she needs panels and the fact that this isn’t part of the launch shows that they were more interested in being first than practical.
Additional weight and complexity on a one off boat would be more expensive than a seperate much more standard solar and battery system on land. And you might be able to get additional value out of selling electricity from an oversized storage.
It's not sensible to draw your system boundaries around the boat by itself; there is significant terminal infrastructure; and even grid electrical infrastructure to consider.
I don’t draw a boundary around the boat. I see a missed opportunity to power non-drive electronics from a renewable source such as solar.
> It's made out of aluminum instead of steel. The resulting weight savings make it a bit more efficient. That's something this shipping yard specializes in.
According to that person, weight does indeed matter.
If you were optimising for mass rather than ease of maintenance you'd probably put them on (despite the relative lack of surface area meaning you still needed to recharge at each end)
There's also the matter of windage and what impacts that might have on the ship.
To say nothing of the capacity factor and reliability of electronics in a marine environment.
This is kinda like saying everyone should wear solar hats to offset their home electric bill.
Yes, but that's highly doubtful. It doesn't work for EVs with panels on the car's roof - you don't get significant charge from it. It's far more practical to put the panels on a larger, fixed structure where the vehicles charges daily.
Sources e.g.
https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/ykwd89/w...
Although at the scale of a one off boat i would think it's cheaper to use the more widespread systems for bigger grid connected panel installations; so you are back to inverters.
> The surface area of a standard car simply isn’t big enough to hold the sheer volume of solar panels that would be needed to capture a meaningful amount of energy from the sun.
https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...
> there just isn’t enough space on top of cars to make a meaningful contribution to the charging needs of the battery
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...
The same must be true of a ship.
Put the larger solar panel installations at the places where the vehicles charge.
And recall that this bridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt... - will need a multi-billion dollar replacement, because the tiny engineering staff of a huge freighter could not diagnose and correct a surprise electrical failure. Within the maybe 3 1/2 minutes between the initial fault, and when the collision became physically inevitable.
At least capture some of that to charge some batteries or extend the length of your voyage.
I used to work on ships and almost everything constantly breaks down without constant maintenance. I bet it would be much cheaper to put the solar panels on land and charge the ship when it's in port.
The energy is free. To capture it costs a little bit of money.
My experience sailing and dealing with vessels from 30ft to 180ft give me a perspective that you probably don’t.
Providing solar panels along the roof would give the ship a few KWh of power that would otherwise be drawing from the main batteries. This would extend the range of the ship by 5-10%.
The math has been done many times for solar panels on the roof of cars, and it's not worthwhile. Ships are not the same though.
At any rate, it's inevitably far more sensible to put a larger solar panel + battery installation at a fixed place on land, and charge vehicles from that.
The ship battery is 40,000 kwh and uses at least 10,000 kwh per crossing, with 10 minutes to recharge. A handful of kwh are negligible because this isn't a sailboat.
The electricity sector in Uruguay has 98% renewable power
Full throttle you’ll be out of juice in a week. Hull speed maybe a month. Depending on wave conditions. But going, stopping, having lunch, enjoying the day, going again, enjoying tomorrow, you can be out there as long as you have provisions.
Now, should you run out of charge during your drive, you simply have to wait a while and you'll have enough to get you to a charging station. Or you can walk, taxi there. On an ocean or channel crossing, you don't have that luxury and must rely on other ships if you run out of charge. The point I'm making is that any electric vehicle should incorporate solar panels into the design to minimize it's dependence entirely on the batteries and can extend it's time doing what it's designed to do.
As solar panels advance and the wattage increases, this will be more and more important as it will open up new avenues for transportation. Like the solar LSA plane "Solar Impulse" that can fly indefinitely.
Not true. Not many at all, in fact vanishingly few. I don't know of any EV currently on sale where it is standard. Because it's not practical. See comment above.
> Now, should you run out of charge during your drive, you simply have to wait a while and you'll have enough to get you to a charging station
Or not, as it adds a few miles of range per day of charging. You're far better off using the V2L capability of another EV to bring the charge to you.
> As solar panels advance and the wattage increases, this will be more and more important
No, it won't. Even at perfect panel efficiency , there just isn't enough room on a car roof to charge a car in reasonable time. Solar panel improvements won't do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454978
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455027
> Like the solar LSA plane "Solar Impulse" that can fly indefinitely.
You can already drive an EV indefinitely, by mounting a much larger surface area of solar panels on your house, and charging your car from that regularly, with or without an intermediate battery that allows you to charge the car overnight. This is proven and practical, unlike solar panels on the car. For solar panels on a car, the math is that it just never will be practical.
The math: https://youtu.be/7L1_zvqg73Q?t=590
This guy's impractical homebrew rig gets "20 to 30 miles per day" when unfolded and the car is not in motion. That unfolding is necessary as there just isn't enough surface area on a car roof to make it worthwhile.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...
It's still far more practical to 5x or 10x the number of solar panels, mount them on a fixed structure like a house roof, where they never have to be folded or moved around, and park the car next to it, to charge.
I don’t think you’re listening. This entire argument would lead to there being an expensive solar option for Teslas. There isn’t. It’s a terrible idea because the yield is bad. Solar panels are big flat panels that point at the sun. Cars are made of curved shapes.
Solar roof on Ioniq 5 and Prius is an option, not standard. And it's rare. In fact, I've never seen it or even heard of it until I looked up what you were saying. And for the Ioniq 5 solar roof, it seems that it's not even offered at all in some countries.
The Prius one is "Offered as an option on the range-topping XSE Premium trim". Far from standard. This roof literally adds up to 4 of miles of range on a good day. (1) So it's a high-end gimmick that has niche use at best on a car, when compared to a fixed solar / battery installation situated where the car is parked.
It won't be any more useful on a boat.
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/13w5cb1/o...
I see many Hyundai Ioniq 5s on the roads in London UK. Exactly 0 of them have a solar roof - it's not even offered as an option here. It's a gimmick and there's no demand for it.