I was watching a live talk show last Saturday. An engineer was being interviewed on the system of solar power he is promoting. It was encouraging because he has a 120-watt solar panel that is foldable and portable too. It comes with a cable and a power case which houses the battery. All right, looks good. However, it was disappointing when the engineer admitted that the battery life is only for 2 hours. Need I say more?
This is the bane of the prevailing electronics industry including batteries for mobile phones and laptops. Engineers and technicians have not found a way to go round the challenge of a short battery life. In any case, one of the factors making solar power to be expensive is the need to buy batteries to replace depleted ones which adds to the capital cost.
Well, we are talking about portability so I guess it's good enough as a startup project but if he is going to sell in the market, I doubt that it would generate him enough returns to sustain the production cost. Nice idea though.
I have always had this suspicion that solar power is never really going to be a thing, at least not as much as once first thought. I think it will evolve too late and we will already have other options in place. I could be wrong, but I am still sticking with that prediction.
Actually, if you have a grid tie system for you house, and a analog meter, then you could feed energy back into the power gird creating a negative on your current bill. In some cases people receive a check from the electric company for giving them electricity. However most places are converting the old analog meters with digital ones and they do not turn backwards like the way analog did. The electric company knows this and doesn't want to give anyone a break anymore. With any renewable energy source, storage is always an issue. It's either you use it or lose it. What most of you don't know is that deep cycle batteries are available to the public and can hold charges longer then car batteries. They are expensive, but if you buy cheaper DC power appliances, then they can be run off of car batteries for a short time. Several car batteries in series can hold a decent charge.
So it's no different from the battery life of a laptop computer. I do think solar batteries have different strengths, depending on the inherent capacity of the solar cells. If you buy solar batteries with more solar cells, which means more power storage, they will last longer than 2 hours I believe. In fact, some houses are powered by solar cells. They last more than 2 hours according to those who already have solar power at home.
It is true I think. Since it is portable, the solar-powered battery has short life span just like the cell phone battery. But to a very brief length of time of 2 hours seems to be unconvincing. Well, there is probably an upgrade for that to make its service long enough for 3 days or so, depending on the frequency of its usage.
Since you say it was portable, it is likely that the battery power is very minimal. I use solar power in my home and it can light 6 LED bulb for 12 hours. My solar power system is a fixed system. The battery is powerful, I can even recharge my laptop and mobile devices.
