Toshiba's Charge Grid puts your solar panels to work, smartly charges your EV

Got a bunch of photovoltaic cells and a vehicle that requires electricity? Toshiba's thought up a process dubbed "Charge Grid" by which you can juice the latter efficiently. When the sun's out and the electrons are flowing, it doesn't pay to put them into the grid, so this system stores them in a rechargeable battery ready to rapidly charge your EV. For nighttime when the electricity rates are low, a bidirectional inverter lets you hop right back on the neighborhood grid, so your solar cells are put to good use and your car is always well fed. The company tells Tech-On commercialization of the system is still a few years away, so you've plenty of time to raze that roof antenna in favor of some photosynthesized electricity.

[Hexydes Posted Jun 21st 2010 9:49AM]

Very cool! I can't wait until my grandkids can use it!

[mikesaar Posted Jun 21st 2010 9:53AM]

Can it put gas in my car?

[MagnetMan Posted Jun 21st 2010 9:57AM]

What EV?!

[Kid Red Posted Jun 21st 2010 9:57AM]

Finally someone came up with it! Now if this can hit the market so I can use it before my kids, that would be great.

[magallanes Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:00AM]

Solar panel is expensive and the power output is really petty.
So, even leaving the car at direct sunlight, it can give us a few minutes of charge.

[JamesR Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:05AM]

@magallanes

Solar sure is pretty!

Panels are getting cheaper and more efficient all the time. Get this infrastructure stuff out there and it will just get better and better.

[Ed T Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:09AM]

The inverter and two-way trip through the storage battery will cost 20% of the power collected by the PV panels, so this is really a dumb idea.

[PhantomPower Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:34AM]

@Ed T
I expect the efficiency of inverters and the like is much higher than they once were. I studied them in school, and the newer systems only leech about 2-5% of your power.

[juanvaldez Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:36AM]

@Ed T I find it simply amazing that you know the loss of the inverter years in advance, so forgive my skepticism but I'll wait and see what they say. In any case, depending on the price, which you might also know years in advance, this still has the potential to save money in the short or long-term for people compared to alternatives of investing in batteries or selling it to the grid and buying it back at a higher rate (unless you are in one of those precious few states that regulate the way a utility prices your grid input).

If it's as bad as you say it is, without any other angle to see it from, it wouldn't really have a commercial value and they'd just be dumping money into a losing venture. I think you're missing something, but feel free to actually back that up with something more substantive.

[mynameisjay Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:41AM]

Like all other awesome technologies, we will probably never see this.

[Mr Pips Posted Jun 21st 2010 10:53AM]

Can it charge the batteries in my boat?

[aigarius Posted Jun 21st 2010 11:01AM]

Well, usually the EVs charge at night at home, when there is no sun. But it could be feasible to have a solar panel at home that will charge a spare battery during the day (at least partially) so that you park you car at home in the evening, remove the empty battery, put in the partially charged one, top it off from the cheap overnight electricity.

So if you combine the solar charging during the day with cheap electricity at night and slow charging (for battery longevity) with battery pack exchange, then you have a reasonably good plan for the daily commute on pure electricity.

[nastro Posted Jun 21st 2010 11:05AM]

Anyone who has taken electri-eng 101 or econ 101 will agree this is totall bullcrap!! You can always see who they angle this type of nonsense to...the emotional and illogical enviro nut cases.

Common sense has been lost on the american people...I guess when you are ranked 25 to 26 in Math and Science this bullcrap can be sold to you.

[aigarius Posted Jun 21st 2010 11:27AM]

@nastro while, I mostly agree, it would be good to provide some actual argumentation, instead of just of 'argument to authority'

[TeslaS Posted Jun 21st 2010 11:18AM]

"it doesn't pay to put them into the grid" - totally wrong
If you pull in Solar power during the day, you want to send power into the grid when it's expensive. Then, you pull the power back out over night when it's cheaper. You make money off the power company. You can make money or pay for batteries that cost you money.

[tivolo Posted Jun 21st 2010 2:59PM]

I thought the same thing: why wouldn't I want to push the power into the grid at peak usage times (i.e. when the sun's out) and pull from it when electricity's the cheapest (at night)? If anything, I would want to charge my car and my batteries at night so that if I needed to do any daytime re-feuling I wouldn't need to pull from the grid.

[beatsandmelody Posted Jun 21st 2010 12:17PM]

"...it doesn't pay to put them into the grid"

I thought it DID pay to put the power back in to the grid? Or is that just the progressive san francisco bay area?

[flyingburger Posted Jun 21st 2010 1:26PM]

@beatsandmelody Yeah this doesn't make any sense at all. Daytime=peak power = more expensive power. So in the day, you sell to the power company, at night you buy power for a lower rate. No humongous power loss from going to a battery and inverter.

[rento Posted Jun 21st 2010 5:24PM]

Nothing new? Apart from the fact that scib are awesome and extremely expensive.