Make My Roof ALL Solar!

[Crissa]

There was this great study that revealed if you lifted panels just 6' off the ground, you could use the land unimpeded as grazing.

I wonder why more places don't do that instead of hiring people to weed-whack and wash all the panels in trucks?

-Crissa

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[CyberOwl]

2.5kW solar tracker equals 4kW fixed panels
stick one of these in the bed and off you go

 

[FutureBoy]

2.5kW solar tracker equals 4kW fixed panels
stick one of these in the bed and off you go

Yeah! That won’t affect the driving efficiency at all!

 

[Tim.Luchenko]

2.5kW solar tracker equals 4kW fixed panels
stick one of these in the bed and off you go

I like this Idea. It could be stored in the secret compartment inside the bed and when you need it - vuala!

 

[firsttruck]

Those may be the PV panels they use for assisting farmers to grow shade crops and generate power at the same time. I would really like some scaled examples done by universities that have both engineering and agriculture departments... my home state of Indiana's Purdue University might be a good choice.

One of the losses with solar panels is due to light reflected off the panel surface.
Bi-facial panels are used to capture energy from light that reflected off the ground behind or underneath the solar panel. Bi-facial is really just two standard panels packed together (one front side and the other back side).

The light does not go through bi-facial panels.

There are special panels that let some of the light through but doing that lowers efficiency.
You already have a very limited amount of space available on cars/trucks so using much lower than normal (19-21%) panels might defeat the whole economic case. Today 19-21% might be economically viable on Cybertruck but higher efficiency would be better (25%-30%).