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Solar panels to truck, direct charging.

5001 Views 47 Replies 21 Participants Last post by  RDale
So, I have the Ford Lightening and 48amp charger installed at my house. I am looking to do a dyi solar project. Since the Supercharging is done with DC, I am wondering if I even need an inverter then charger next to the panels. The solar panels produce DC, Supercharger is done with DC. So I should be able to Charge my truck directly from the Solar panels if the strings were configured at the correct voltage. It makes no sense for me to first convert DC from the panels to AC with a solar inverter then use an AC charging unit to charge the truck. What you all say?
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There are commercial off the shelf products coming for this. Enteligent is the one I am looking at most closely. The DCBEL one also has a high voltage DC input IIRC. There will be others soon too, now that ISO 15118-20 was finally published 6 months ago.
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I'm interested in this type of system. Hopefully coming soon.
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So, I have the Ford Lightening and 48amp charger installed at my house. I am looking to do a dyi solar project. Since the Supercharging is done with DC, I am wondering if I even need an inverter then charger next to the panels. The solar panels produce DC, Supercharger is done with DC. So I should be able to Charge my truck directly from the Solar panels if the strings were configured at the correct voltage. It makes no sense for me to first convert DC from the panels to AC with a solar inverter then use an AC charging unit to charge the truck. What you all say?
Lets start by discussing a key difference between AC and DC charging with a modern EV.

When charging with AC, the charging is done using an onboard charger. You carry it around with you in the vehicle. The EVSE just supplies the power to it, the onboard charger does the rest. Supplying AC power to this charger is cheap and easy,

For DC charging, the charger is off-board. The components used to build these DC chargers are still brutally expensive. At this point is costing about $30,000 to build a small DC charger (25kw) with off-the-shelf components, and that does not even begin to address the cost of modulating and controlling the wild-DC off your roof into it. As of last look (last year) building a small charger the way you describe would cost north of one hundred thousand dollars.

With the on-board charger capable of charging the truck at nearly 20kw, such a project does not make much financial sense.

There are commercial solutions being worked on, but because of the cost of handling high voltage DC, we are probably a ways out still for residential type solutions at reasonable costs.
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Those cost figures are for DC fast chargers. Home DC charging doesn't need to be that fast. Sales guy for Enteligent is talking about an order of magnitude lower cost to acquire than that. Their AC to DC is only 9.6kW, for example. Solar and/or battery storage draw that stays entirely as DC, never converted to AC and back, is gravy on top of that in their setup. Still a ton of details I'm trying to nail down with them about actual install, control, etc.

I highly doubt the ones I've found are the only products that will be in the market in 1-3 years time. So the answer on off the shelf home Solar to DC charging isn't "never", more like "not quite yet, but soon".
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Those cost figures are for DC fast chargers. Home DC charging doesn't need to be that fast. Sales guy for Enteligent is talking about an order of magnitude lower cost to acquire than that. Their AC to DC is only 9.6kW, for example. Solar and/or battery storage draw is gravy on top of that. Still a ton of details I'm trying to nail down with them about actual install, control, etc.

I highly doubt the ones I've found are the only products that will be in the market in 1-3 years time. So the answer on off the shelf home Solar to DC charging isn't "never", more like "not quite yet, but soon".
DC charging is DC charging, it is the same process regardless of speed. Lower power = lower component cost for sure.

I am in the business, and closely tracking solutions such as the one you mentioned. I guess my point is that as of now, this is not a viable "DIY" project. Like you, I am super eager to see some solutions hit the market.
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Oh agreed that significant voltage and/or amperage and "just enough knowledge to make you dangerous" shouldn't go together. Great way to end up with a pile of ash where your garage used to be. So my point was to not try to shadetree engineer what the OP was discussing when there will be EE designed and hopefully well tested products out soon.

When you say you're "in the business", which business is that? Solar install?

Solar installers in my local area have been a real pain to project plan with. Wish they would keep up with the latest products, but instead they only want to install what they sell (at 200% markup), and the only things they sell are what they have been installing for a decade.
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Oh agreed that significant voltage and/or amperage and "just enough knowledge to make you dangerous" shouldn't go together. Great way to end up with a pile of ash where your garage used to be. So my point was to not try to shadetree engineer what the OP was discussing when there will be EE designed and hopefully well tested products out soon.

When you say you're "in the business", which business is that? Solar install?

Solar installers in my local area have been a real pain to project plan with. Wish they would keep up with the latest products, but instead they only want to install what they sell (at 200% markup), and the only things they sell are what they have been installing for a decade.
I am power systems designer. I design power grids, specialising in solar/hydro/wind hybrid grids. I have built dozens of electric cars, conversions, and electric hot-rods over the years. I owned/operated an electric vehicle dealership for a number of years, but am 90% retired now. These days, the bulk of what I do is design and inspect hybrid power grids in yachts. I am old, and don't really want to work that hard anymore.:cool:

You are dead-on with rooftop solar companies, their focus is extremely narrow. Their product, their software, as soon as it gets out of their comfort zone, the solar installers in the PNW tell the customer to call me.

There are a half-dozen entities that I know of that are working on interesting products for solar + EV. Having sat at the design table for a couple of them, there is an over-reaching problem that most are trying to overcome: just plain rooftop solar + regular old EVSE is too good. It is like trying to invent a wheel that is more round. Let me explain...

I have plain old rooftop grid-tied solar on one of my homes. I also have EVSEs (4 of them). In my state, power credit is 1/1, so the grid acts as a perfect battery. I say perfect because if I put a KW into it, I get a lossless KW out of it. Because rooftop solar is site-usage-first, any power I am producing goes into my car first. If the car needs more, I can pull out of my grid "battery", to be replaced to the grid after I unplug my car. I get to do this for free. There is inverter loss, but it is quite small. A DC direct system will remove some of the loss, but nowhere near enough to justify the cost of building such a system (in the designs I have been involved in). The added complexity and dedicated components end up being a Rube Goldberg machine.

So by default, any solar you produce on your roof will go into your car first, this is a good thing. But what if you don't want to use any grid power in your car, and shut down the charger if there is not enough solar to charge it? That is a simple matter of grid-gating, and only running your EVSE when the gate is in the positive flow mode. Ideally, the EVSE would also try to throttle to use whatever is available. Wall is making an EVSE that does just that, and I like it a lot.

This brings us back to the question of solar DC/DC charging. Because of all of the above it is viewed by most engineers as being a novelty; a fun way to do it differently, but not having a real market.

That said, as soon as somebody builds one, I will buy it. I like novelties.
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I agree with 99% of what you said, but I'd like to add one extension or caveat. DC bidirectional charging changes that equation in a significant way. The grid is a super low cost to you battery (great analogy, debate about the merits of net metering for another day), until it isn't available for whatever reason.

If the same box gives you solar PV direct to the car, and DC back out to your grid forming inverter, you get two functions from the same connection to the car device. Instead of having to buy a huge rolling battery in an EV and a huge fixed storage battery to cover outages, you can downsize your fixed storage somewhat and have the EV be a deeper, rare use backup for the worst outage in the dead of winter. That's what excites me the most about a DC bidirectional station at home, is buying ~$3k in equipment to be able to access ~$30k worth of rolling battery when I'm home.
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I agree with 99% of what you said, but I'd like to add one extension or caveat. DC bidirectional charging changes that equation in a significant way. The grid is a super low cost to you battery (great analogy, debate about the merits of net metering for another day), until it isn't available for whatever reason.

If the same box gives you solar PV direct to the car, and DC back out to your grid forming inverter, you get two functions from the same connection to the car device. Instead of having to buy a huge rolling battery in an EV and a huge fixed storage battery to cover outages, you can downsize your fixed storage somewhat and have the EV be a deeper, rare use backup for the worst outage in the dead of winter. That's what excites me the most about a DC bidirectional station at home, is buying ~$3k in equipment to be able to access ~$30k worth of rolling battery when I'm home.
In other words, You could use EV battery as a backup pack to power the house when grid is down. Beautiful.
Thanks for the info guys. I was also motivated by a gentleman who is pulling a trailer with additional batteries behind his Rav4 EV for the extended range. He just hooks them to his Ev battery in parallel. Assuming that two lithium battries when connected in parallel do exchange charge and equal/even out, Why not treat DC coming out of the Solar array as his trailer battery and just hook it up to the EV battery? Even the MPPT chargers/Controllers are pretty cheap. Why can't we charge EV battery same way we charge the lithium power walls?
I agree with 99% of what you said, but I'd like to add one extension or caveat. DC bidirectional charging changes that equation in a significant way. The grid is a super low cost to you battery (great analogy, debate about the merits of net metering for another day), until it isn't available for whatever reason.

If the same box gives you solar PV direct to the car, and DC back out to your grid forming inverter, you get two functions from the same connection to the car device. Instead of having to buy a huge rolling battery in an EV and a huge fixed storage battery to cover outages, you can downsize your fixed storage somewhat and have the EV be a deeper, rare use backup for the worst outage in the dead of winter. That's what excites me the most about a DC bidirectional station at home, is buying ~$3k in equipment to be able to access ~$30k worth of rolling battery when I'm home.
This is a great idea, and of course is how the Lightning is advertised as working. When the press releases came out, I was excited over-the-moon that they had evidently addressed the niggles that the rest of us were dealing with and had a true plug-n-play system for the market.

Alas, it appears they are still working on those niggles with the rest of us. Ford/Sunrun's system is far from a "$3k system" (I am seeing quotes north of $20k and that does not even tie in the solar yet).

DC-tie Solar + backup + EV + grid is a challenge that some good companies are working on. I believe this thread started as a "DIY" idea of tying your solar to the DC pins, and my overall point is that this is not a DIY topic.

The system to do what we want should get ironed out in the next couple of years; GM is coming online with their V2G trucks as well. It will not be terribly affordable. I predict systems to be in the range of $20k-$30k, not including panels or batteries.
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Thanks for the info guys. I was also motivated by a gentleman who is pulling a trailer with additional batteries behind his Rav4 EV for the extended range. He just hooks them to his Ev battery in parallel. Assuming that two lithium battries when connected in parallel do exchange charge and equal/even out, Why not treat DC coming out of the Solar array as his trailer battery and just hook it up to the EV battery? Even the MPPT chargers/Controllers are pretty cheap. Why can't we charge EV battery same way we charge the lithium power walls?
The BMS must be able to control the charging and the rate, or you risk damage to your pack. For this reason, if the incoming charge is not controllable, the vehicle will rightly shut it down. Unless you are going to bypass the BMS and the system controller on the vehicle (proprietary and closed), you have to handshake with the vehicle for it to accept the control and then the charge. "Cheap MPPT controllers" are obviously not going to provide any of this.

One of the reasons that modern EV batteries have a long life expectancy is the rigid controls they are equipped with. Bypassing these (like bypassing the safeguards to tie in a parallel towed battery) could dramatically affect the life of your 131KW pack.

Have you done a price check on replacing one of those?:oops:
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Yes solar straight into a battery has been done before and probably will be done again, just like paralleling two batteries outside of BMS control has been done. It takes 1001 details done perfectly right to do it safely, and it takes missing one little thing to burn up the whole works. Not a risk I want to take, and not a risk I would recommend to anyone without the necessary knowledge.

Agreed that what I heard from Sunrun about their system was cringe worthy at best in almost every way

OEM integrated DC bidirectional charging doesn't bypass the BMS, AFAIK. I believe the ISO 15118-20 signaling over the vestigial J1772 pins is a request to the BMS and vehicle control and contractors to allow this to happen. Well integrated, the vehicle shouldn't let you get below a certain user specified SOC in the EV, to make sure you can still make a drive to a functioning DC fast charger that still has power.

My dollar figure was just for the DC bidirectional charger element of the larger system. The PV panels, racking, fixed batteries, inverter, wiring, conduit and troughs, power distribution panels, disconnects, etc all add up into multi tens of thousands of dollars in cost to be sure. Worse the more UL Listing requirements get slapped on the project, as I'm sure you are aware. . But if I'm already doing all that, another $3k addon (price target given by Enteligent sales) to unlock the kWh stored in your EV that one or two or twenty times you need it seems like a reasonable spend to me. Especially when one directional AC EVSE's are still commanding the prices that they do. Again, having that backup kick in automatically to keep the ground source heat pump going through the night in the middle of December for my advanced age mother is the higher priority than the absolute minimum cost in my particular use case. Somebody else will choose a cheap portable generator with manual start and connect instead, and probably do just fine with that cost to benefit ratio too. It's choose your own adventure that way, and that's just fine by me. I'm just glad the options are coming.
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I'm just glad the options are coming.
Me too!!
Ok. Thanks Guys. No to the idea of sending Solar DC current to the EV battery. Any thoughts on the guys running around with the trailer battery for extra range? It seems to work for many people.
I was subscribed to him for sometime, but dropped that when he was talking about such ideas as if they were realistic. To tap into the wiring of a modern EV with your homemade ideas is just crazy, and very dangerous.
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It would be far better if OEMs, SAE, etc could agree to integrate a standard port on the rear of the vehicle for a range extender trailer to be plugged in. There were business trialing small aerodynamic trailer based battery swap well over a decade ago. The fact that OEMs wouldn't play ball with the concept was a giant missed opportunity.
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...and....then there's the farmer's question from yesterday: " why don't ya'll just add an alternator to that 'thang and then you wouldn't even have to stop! "... o.k., I'm sure the engineers are workin' on that.
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Yes solar straight into a battery has been done before and probably will be done again, just like paralleling two batteries outside of BMS control has been done. It takes 1001 details done perfectly right to do it safely, and it takes missing one little thing to burn up the whole works. Not a risk I want to take, and not a risk I would recommend to anyone without the necessary knowledge.

Agreed that what I heard from Sunrun about their system was cringe worthy at best in almost every way

OEM integrated DC bidirectional charging doesn't bypass the BMS, AFAIK. I believe the ISO 15118-20 signaling over the vestigial J1772 pins is a request to the BMS and vehicle control and contractors to allow this to happen. Well integrated, the vehicle shouldn't let you get below a certain user specified SOC in the EV, to make sure you can still make a drive to a functioning DC fast charger that still has power.

My dollar figure was just for the DC bidirectional charger element of the larger system. The PV panels, racking, fixed batteries, inverter, wiring, conduit and troughs, power distribution panels, disconnects, etc all add up into multi tens of thousands of dollars in cost to be sure. Worse the more UL Listing requirements get slapped on the project, as I'm sure you are aware. . But if I'm already doing all that, another $3k addon (price target given by Enteligent sales) to unlock the kWh stored in your EV that one or two or twenty times you need it seems like a reasonable spend to me. Especially when one directional AC EVSE's are still commanding the prices that they do. Again, having that backup kick in automatically to keep the ground source heat pump going through the night in the middle of December for my advanced age mother is the higher priority than the absolute minimum cost in my particular use case. Somebody else will choose a cheap portable generator with manual start and connect instead, and probably do just fine with that cost to benefit ratio too. It's choose your own adventure that way, and that's just fine by me. I'm just glad the options are coming.
"Agreed that what I heard from Sunrun about their system was cringe worthy at best in almost every way"
Already contacted Sunrun for a quote. Waiting on reply. Can you provide more detail re issues with their solution?
Thanks
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