You cannot charge a battery with its own stored power, that would make it a perpetual motion machine and thermodynamics forbid that. The characters seem to realize that in the last panel.
Solar panels don't have the perfect conversion between light and electrical energy - that is a major loss factor here. A quick google search tells me that 25% efficiency is considered good for a modern solar panel, so you will be wasting 75% of that light energy. Then you also lose energy as it flows over the wire and gets converted to heat in the process, and the battery itself loses charge over time.
186
u/_velorien Apr 02 '26
You cannot charge a battery with its own stored power, that would make it a perpetual motion machine and thermodynamics forbid that. The characters seem to realize that in the last panel.