 Quote:
Originally Posted by TromboneAl
How much of the cost of a PV system is the electronics to convert the DC from the panels into AC? I wonder if there would be significant savings if you skipped that, and just had the electronics that took the DC and handled the car charging with that.
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Theoretically, you could gain some eff% there, by eliminating the loses in the conversions, and some capital savings w/o the inverter, but...
practically, anytime you had your car away from home when the sun was shining you would be losing out. W/O that inverter, the energy would have no place to go. The grid/inverter makes a very cheap storage system.
Plus, the car charge system would need a separate DC input. The electronics to handle the range of DC voltage from solar as the sun varies in strength would be about the same complexity/cost as the inverter.
So while it makes sense on one level, the overall simplicity/flexibility of getting everything to the 120V AC 'baseline', just seems to trump any other gains.
-ERD50
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