Sunday 16 January 2011

Charging a Tesla Roadster using one's own wind turbine.

The most important thing to look at for the Roadster’s charging needs is the amount of energy that it takes to fully charge the vehicle.


Easiest way to find out: using this page, from Tesla Motors' website.

Using this page, it says that at 240 V, it will pull up to 70 A of current, leading to a power consumption of (240 V)(70 A) = 16800 W = 16.8 kW.

To charge fully, it will require four hours to charge, meaning that it will require (16.8 kW)(4 h) = 67.2 kWh.

Now looking at the ZüS Classic from Global Wind Group, it says that it can provide up to a 1 kW power supply.

This means that, given that there were enough batteries available to maintain the charge, a single ZüS Classic would have to run for 67.2 hours at maximum performance in order to provide enough electricity to charge the Roadster. Even if it did run at maximum performance, the energy lost just due to the system, I’d guess that it would require a good three solid days at maximum performance in order to charge the car once.

Of course, if you add more of these turbines, then just divide that 67.2 hours by the number of turbines, and you’ll find the number of hours that the turbines will need to run for at maximum performance in order to charge the vehicle. Since it’ll take four hours for the vehicle to charge, and it has a power draw of 16.8 kW, then about 17 turbines at maximum performance should adequately power it.

Important thing: maximum performance is not going to happen.

Overall, due to the low power output of these vertical axis turbines, it might just not be possible. By maximum performance, I mean the wind blowing at the minimum required speed for maximum power output. Looking at the graphs of the horizontal axis (or... traditional, I suppose) turbines at RedRiven, it appears that maximum power output is at 11 meters per second, which is about 40 km per hour. Obviously not realistic. Now looking at the wind speed data at WindAtlas, the average annual wind speed at my house is 5.24 meters per second, and 5.68 meters per second for Niverville.

Looking at the power output graphs again, it looks like about 5 meters per second leads to a power output of about 5 kW if using their largest (50 kW) model turbine.

Cost? $161,070.00 to $195,877.50 in US Dollars, not including installation, taxes, or freight.

Don't forget the cost of those, as well as the other equipment that's required, such as wiring, power inverters, voltage regulators, and the like.

Cost of Manitoba Hydro per kWh: 6.57¢.
This means it'll cost about $4.42 to charge the vehicle: (67.2 kWh)($0.0657 per kWh)=$4.41504
You'd need to charge the car around 36482 times for it to pay for the cheapest of the 50 kW wind turbines: ($161,070.00)/($4.41504 per charge) = 36482 charges or so.

The car has a highway range of at least 360 km, so (36482 charges)(360 km per charge) = 13.13 million kilometers driven for that cheapest wind turbine alone to be paid for.

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