Vehicle-integrated PV

Canadian custom module manufacturer Capsolar developed a vehicle integrated PV system (VIPV) for an electric material towing application, reportedly enabling 30% to 40% range increase per battery charge.

Researchers in Portugal have addressed the so-called ‘parking dilemma’ of electric cars incorporating photovoltaic modules. They looked into the tradeoff between charging the car and raising its inside temperature. They calculated the critical time as a function of the car’s solar capacity.

Researchers in South Korea have developed a process to enable colored and flexible, thin film modules suitable for vehicle and building-integrated PV applications. It is reportedly a low-cost process that does not significantly impact power conversion efficiency.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy (ISE) has advanced vehicle-integrated PV (VIPV) technology by installing solar cells directly onto a standard sheet-metal car hood. The researchers placed a 115 W prototype array on the hood of a Volkswagen with a specialized lamination process.

Sono Motors has equipped its first bus with its PV retrofit solution, featuring 16 semi-flexible rooftop solar modules to feed 1.4 kW of output into the vehicle’s battery system.

Researchers in Spain assembled an experimental solar simulator for vehicle-integrated and curved solar panels. They found that the measurements of the short-circuit current of the cells followed the ideal cosine response of the curvature with differences lower than 0.5%.

Toyota says it will combine EneCoat’s perovskite solar cells and its own in-vehicle technologies for solar panels. Enecoat has developed a perovskite module conversion efficiency of 19.4%.

A new generation of flexible, lightweight modules is entering the market. With back contact technology offering its own form of design flexibility and robustness, the new products could crack a hard-to-address market segment.

Thin-film technologies have long promised to make a major impact on the solar industry but have largely been constrained to niche applications and research labs if they were not shredded by the market. After several false starts, current trade dynamics and promising research programs may help solar thin films find their place in the sun.

Sono Motors, a solar electric-vehicle manufacturer in Germany, has terminated its Sion passenger car development program, as it has failed to secure enough funding to support pre-series production. It says it will now focus exclusively on retrofitting and integrating its patented solar technology into third-party vehicles.