Question

Good old Florida! As an alum of UCF, you also plan to use an off-grid power system. While you absolutely adore four-wheel drive, you bought a plug-in hybrid car, for cost efficiency. Estimate the number of excess solar panels you would need to add to your off-grid power system in order to keep your car charged up without ever burning a drop of gasoline.

Answer 1

Theoretically, you can charge with your solar panel but there are a few practical limitations that today's chargers and solar inverters don't support:
The charging station is hardwired for a particular voltage and current. Unfortunately, solar panels put out variable voltage and current, depending on the amount of sunlight that hits them. Someone would have to build a circuit that set the voltage out of the solar panels to a 120v and then communicates the amount of current that it can provide with the charging circuit in the car so it won't try to draw too much.
Unless you provide a lot of panels though, it would charge very slowly, potentially several days for a full charge.
To put numbers to it: Remember that a Leaf has a 24 kilowatt hour battery. If you have a 1 kilowatt solar array, at maximum production, it would take 24 hours (of peak sunshine) to fill that 24 kilowatt hour battery. To roughly figure out the output of your solar panels, multiply the voltage by the current output and that is our output wattage.

Those flexible panels have a lot of interesting applications, especially for mobile folks a long way from the power grid such as the military.

Unfortunately, 2 of your panels only put out a maximum of 120 watts under perfect conditions. Realistically, you only would average less than half of this throughout the middle of a day. A Leaf gets about 3 miles per kilowatt hour, meaning your 60 watt (.06 kilowatt) would only charge at 1 mile every 5.5 hours so you would maybe be able to drive 1 to 2 miles per day.

To charge with the sun, you need several thousand watts (kilowatts) of solar panels. The best way to do this is generally to put high efficiency cells on your roof. I would guess that you would need about 1.5 to 2 kilowatts for your 10 mile commute if your roof has a good southern exposure. A solar installer will be able to more accurately estimate how many panels needed for your approximately 3 - 4 kilowatt hour per day driving needs.