Adding solar cells to any electric car will reduce the cost to operate the car and reduce consumption of oil. It can also make economic sense.

Toyota (TM) announced that they would be adding solar cells to their popular Prius electric hybrid. The intention is to use the solar cells to power the air conditioner. It would be better to have the solar cells recharge the battery, although a large enough battery for the plug-in Prius may have to wait until 2010.

EEStor is developing a high voltage capacitor that could be a breakthrough in the development of electric and gas hybrid electric cars. EEStor has developed an improved dielectric material that allows the use of very high voltages in their capacitor compared to traditional capacitors. The EEStor capacitor has the potential of making gas electric hybrid cars are reality.

The amount of energy that can be stored in a capacitor is determined by the formula:

I’ve always wanted to get a big monster truck. Huge tires, sits really high off the road, good visibility, don’t have to worry about road obstructions like pot holes, goes in the snow, even take it off-road. The problem is that these big monster trucks don’t get very good gas mileage.

Well now Oshkosh Truck Corporation (OSK) has designed a truck using Diesel Electric Hybrid technology that increases fuel efficiency 20% over the truck it replaces. The HEMTT A3 truck is being built for the military, which is pretty demanding about reliability and performance.

I think everyone can agree that solar company stocks have been volatile. There seems to be lots of disagreement on their current valuation. Some people see the stocks as having run up too much, over-bought and expensive, suggesting they should decline back to reasonable levels. Others see the stocks as cheap and are just getting started on major up moves.

All of these companies produce basically the same product. The product converts sunlight into electricity. Some of the companies use basic semi-conductor manufacturing processes to turn polysilicon into photo-electric cells. Other companies use more exotic (different) processes to make cells out of thin films.

All of the solar cell manufacturers are supply constrained. The entire world produced a total of 3.8 Giga Watts [GW] of solar cells in 2007. The manufacturing capacity for solar cells is small compared to the capacity required by government initiatives to increase renewable power production.

Europe wants to produce 21% of its power from renewable resources. America and other countries like China are also seeking to expand renewable power initiatives. This creates huge demand. Worldwide electric production (2005) was 18,560,000 GW hours total. By my rough calculations, one year of solar cell production produces about 0.05% of total world electric production.