Solar Energy for Charging Fork Truck Batteries

Abstract

The demand for renewable energy sources has stimulated technological advances in solar cell development. Initially, development and fabrication were extremely costly and no encouragement for use in industrial applications was made. Today, evidence exists that new technological advances and mass-production techniques have lowered the costs considerably. The U.S. Department of Energy has indicated that by the year 1990 the price per peak watt would be less than fifty U.S. cents.

This paper keeps this price decrease in mind and does an economic study on the feasibility of using photovoltaic cells to charge electric fork lift trucks, at different costs per peak watt. This particular idea could be used as a measure of energy conservation for industrial material handling. Two evaluation methods were used; namely, the Payback Method, and the Modified Energy Inflation Rate Method. Neither of the methods proved to be economically favorable, but some interesting results were obtained.