Floridian Unlimited – rollable solar panel for Electric Vehicles (EV)

I use “Floridian Unlimited” prototype in this video. 400W and 1000W models are planned. For instance, 1000W model can gives you 27 miles of free range daily. These calculations are made for south states of the USA and Tesla Model 3 (rated 3.8 miles per kWh). For whole year, this gives you $996 of free electricity (see calculations below).
“Floridian Unlimited” is equipped with standard EV charging plug (J1772) and can be mounted by one person.

The price for small quantities is about $2499 for end users. This is rough calculations because we have some big unknowns here. For example, “perovskite printed solar panels” just starting to hit mass production, and its price is unknown. But the “perovskite material” is cheaper than silicon currently used, so I hope price for this device can be lowered down to $500 or even less.

Supercapacitors are another expensive part. I plan to use 6 pcs. of 3,000 farads supercapacitors (BCAP3000 P270 K04) with a cost of about $60 each. They will be used as “electricity” buffer. For example, EV expect 6 Amp and 110-120V minimum as defined in J1772 specification (10% pilot pin duty cycle), but solar panel can generate much less power in low sunlight conditions. In this case, “electricity” buffer will be used.
Supercapacitors have 1 million cycles that is much better than LiFePO4 with 10k cycles.

Technical specifications

“Floridian Unlimited 400W” model 2m2

“Floridian Unlimited 1000W” model 5m2

Open source and Open hardware project.

Economic effect for “Floridian Unlimited”

Let’s calculate a price of generated electricity. We will use maps that show solar photovoltaics potential from the U.S. Department of Energy.

For part of California, we have more than 7 kWh/m2/day. The conservative effectivness assumption for perovskite solar panels is 20%. This gives us for 1,000W model:

7 * 5m2 * 0.2 = 7kWh per day.

For example, Tesla Model 3 rated 3.8 miles per kWh, so 7kWh can give you about 27 free miles per day.

Public EV charging stations cost from $0.39 to $0.79 per kWh in range (source).
In this case, our generated 7kWh cost 7 * 0.39 = $2.73 daily. For whole year, this gives us $996 of free electricity.
So, $2499 device would pay for itself within a 2.5 years.

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