Australia is now ready for vertical solar, add a few more hours of production in the morning and evening. Panels are dirt cheap anyway, use them as fences, put them on high rise buildings. Change the building to require structural elements to hold the panels and build new homes with vertical + rooftop. The electric code should be updated to allow v2g.
With BESS (home, grid) and EVs (always plugged in, parked 95% of the time), there may be enough storage to start replacing baseload. This will take decades, but can be done. We gotta start somewhere.
I found the challenge with our own was just matching the peak of the panels to the peak voltage accepted by our inverter (including a safe margin for cold+snowy days where peak voltage is the highest), otherwise I totally would’ve loved to overpanel like crazy. George Costanza voice, I would drape my house in panels, if it were socially acceptable.
Given the durability of panels, it'd be fascinating to see roof redesigns, and some changes in panel packaging, that standard large rectangles become the basic components of a 30 year roof. Or as siding. I've seen them used vertically on the Southern walls of commercial buildings in Alaska, and they looked great.
Absolutely. Energy has to be baked into every structural element. Either producing energy, or storing energy, or providing insulation, or acting as a transfer medium (heat pump).
Why don't they do this for cars?
I'd imagine the difference between flat and curved, in addition to very different wear patterns, and inability to get your desired color.
Even slight changes in packaging to adapt the panels to a structural material might increase cost. But doing custom shapes to fit the panels of a car? Getting just the right shape? That's an entirely different manufacturing process nothing like what currently gets produced.
The benefit on cars is also pretty small, at least whenever I've bothered to calculate it. Cars need a massive amount of energy compared to a house, and have far less surface area.
…which is also never in an ideal angle for production..
Sono Motors tried it and went under..
In theory, it sounds great and even obvious, but once you get into the details - not so much..
It requires large solar overcapacity to compensate for seasonal intermittency. Dedicated seasonal energy storage might be better economically.
Solar overcapacity is really cheap, because panels are really cheap. Dedicated seasonal energy storage technology doesn't even exist right now, much less economically efficient storage technology. The closest thing would be a massive thermal store used for district heating, but only prototypes are starting right now. Industrial scaling and mass deployment? That's a decade+ away at a minimum.
We could build seasonal overcapacity today, and it would be nearly economically competitive with existing fossil sources.
It's hard to internalize just how cheap solar panels have become. Keeping the same inverter and grid connection, and doubling the panel capacity, nowhere near doubles the cost of the install.