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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

I know solar isn’t enough to power these significantly but these busses seem like the best place to try, in sunny SoCal.

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A typical bus is apparently about 40 ft x 7.5 ft, giving a roof are of roughly 28 sq m.

Southern California gets roughly 5 kWh/sqm/day on average (though much less in the winter).

Electric school buses apparently have batteries of about 100-300 kWh, so a dollar panel on the roof could get a 5% charge on a good day.

That doesn't really make sense, when maintaining, cleaning, and setting up more efficient tracking solar on roofs (you need a huge parking lot for all those school buses afterall) or in solar farms would be easier, cheaper, and more efficient

Yes, could be in the parking lot. Part of the "solar" could be to put skylights in the roof of the bus and turn off the overhead lighting I often see.

Might be. Schools have a lot of roof space and busses are generally used only twice a day at low speeds with multiple-minute stops for a total of 60-90 minutes per interval.

A lot of sun in Los Angeles to charge between 8:30a-2pm and 4pm-sundown.

this used to be laughable to consider like 15 years ago, but there are guys on Endless-Sphere (ebike forum) that have solar on their bike that in some cases can generate enough power from the sun to keep the bike going. This would be a pretty simple calculation- I hope someone with more recent numbers could do it here

Put the solar panels on the school buildings, and the busses can plug in when they get there (and you get the benefit of reducing the school's electricity costs in general). They'd probably be able to charge enough in the sunny period of the day to do both the afternoon and next morning run.

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