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One of my early interests has been in the areas of solar power and energy storage. One of our projects which was featured at many Mother Earth News Fairs was coupling Solar with Ultracapacitors (Supercapacitors). Unlike energy storage using batteries, which required support electronics for charging, this approach was much simplier and much more straight forward. But it requires some design work to stay within the given operating parameters.

 

One of the design parameters involves the open circuit voltage of the solar panel(s). This value will help determine the construction of the ultracapacitor bank and how many of the ultracapacitors will need to be wired in series to handle this open circuit voltage without damage.

 

In our case, we used the Maxwell 2.7V 3000 Farad capacitors in an arrangement of series and parallel circuits to solve both the open circuit voltage issue and to give us a reasonable amount of energy for future use. The amount of energy stored is rated in Joules (watts/sec). In order to keep well above

the open circuit voltage of our solar panels (30 vdc) we put 14 capacitors in series in a string, then paralleled as many of these series strings as desired to get to a reasonable amount of energy storage.

 

Think of one of those little solar walkway lights but instead one on steriods? But instead of using rechargable batteries with a small life span, we now have an arrangement which has 1 million cycles capability and a stated lifetime of ten years with enough energy storage to keep a small TV running for 1 ½ hours or some LED lighting all night long.