Ok so here's my basic plan:
- basic ebike (50-100 mile LFP battery, dime a dozen on the market)
- tow a trailer (adapt a kiddo trailer or whatever), basically a long box/cooler with a lid, but the lid is solar panels. Or has solar panels glued/mounted, I found these that can't possibly be legitimate they seem so light:
https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Panel-Flexible-Monocrystalline-Photovoltaic/dp/B0BNVLXKN1/ref=psdc_2236628011_t1_B0BC96BWGT?th=1
- so two of those would be 3.3 feet long, 21 inches wide (maybe room for three of them widthwise, 32 inches isn't even three feet), and really small. Basically, tow a long cooler with those glued on.
- even if 2-3 x 200 watt rated panels only return 50% in practice... that 200-300 watts, that would probably triple or quadruple the all-electric range of the bike maybe even perpetual, and the rider can toss in more wattage as desired. Even a lazy crank from a reasonably healthy human is almost 100 watts.
- heck you could add more batteries or extra batteries to the rear trailer, lots of room to haul camper equipment and rain gear
- the panels are DC, the batteries are also DC usually with an AC adapter, why invert to AC from the panels so the charger can re-invert for the battery, are there DC "adapters" for things like this?
- you could always tow two trailers for even more...
- obviously you don't want the panels to be 100 pounds, but those linked panels seem to just be 2 pounds each, and there are DC-DC vanlife inverters that weight 4 pounds. What else would you need besides a cable to the ebike battery charge port?
Another guy is closer to what I would do, he had a trailer of three solar panels and a recumbent (with another panel as a sunshield). His blog complained a lot about the lack of water and supplies... but his trailer was just the solar panels. Seemed like he missed an opportunity for free cargo storage. The recumbent and sunshield as another solar panel was a good idea.
Also wondering when good 30%+ multijunctions will hit the market. I can see there are lots of production problems, but the best you can get is multijunction and 20% ish. There has to be so many applications for more expensive but light and high efficiency like this.