Impact of additional PV weight on the energy consumption of electric
vehicles with onboard PV
Abstract
Photovoltaics (PV) in onboard vehicle applications adds weight to an
electric vehicle (EV), increasing the overall energy consumption.
Although the added PV system weight (1.5– 40 kg) is small compared to
the vehicle weight (1500–2200 kg), the power generated by PV (55–700
W) is also very small com- pared to the power needed (up to 80–285 kW)
to propel an EV, making the effect of additional PV system weight on
energy con- sumption a non-trivial topic to analyze. We present a method
to study the impact of vehicle onboard PV weight on the energy balance
of EVs for different Vehicle-added PV (VAPV) and vehi- cle-integrated PV
(VIPV) configurations with eight different PV technologies, using data
from vehicle onboard measurement campaigns and simulations. Simulations
are carried out for the driving phase of two electric cars (medium and
large passenger cars). Our method calculates the energy consumption
attributa- ble to the added PV system weight (0.05–1.4 Wh/km) and PV
energy yield (0.12–3.12 Wh/km) for a selection of trips. The re- sults
of these simulations are expressed through a newly intro- duced
parameter called “onboard PV yield factor”, where posi- tive values
indicate a net energy gain and negative values indicate a net energy
loss of the onboard PV system. Our results show that the onboard PV
yield factor for a VAPV configuration can range between -69.1 and 86.9
%, and for a VIPV configuration, between 77.2 and 89.7 %.