Solar Panel Con

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Dec 24

RE: City using green cash to add solar panels on ambulances. News item the Hamilton Spectator 10 Dec 24.

With great fanfare and smiles, the city allowed itself to be climate-conned with this purchase of solar panels that are to be installed on the roofs of ambulances. The alleged purpose of the panels is to power the electrical equipment inside the vehicle without need to run the engine.

But the equipment won’t be run off the panels directly; the equipment will be powered by a battery, and the purpose of the solar panels is to recharge the battery.

This arrangement is elaborate nonsense. A deep-discharge lithium-ion battery is capable of being recharged from the engine of the ambulance itself, just at the lead-acid battery of the ambulance already is.  A lead-acid battery fails quickly when subject to even a few deep-discharges, but a lithium-ion battery handles repeated deep-discharge well.  The ambulance’s engine is let to idle to prevent the lead-acid battery from deep-discharge.  The normal operation of the ambulance engine is sufficient to recharge both its lead-acid and a separate lithium ion battery that powers the equipment in the back when the engine is turned off.  The expensive and foolish elaboration of this exercise is the substitution of solar panels for the vehicle’s engine as the means of recharge.

The taxpayers are getting conned again because their representatives are too easily dazzled by enviro-nonsense.

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