I know this is an old thread but it seems doable( I want to convert an old 850 spider(I don’t have one yet) but I am most curious about the heat shedding 3000 watts per hour. Two things that’s 3 out of 20 kw of the total power lost to heat, correct? And is there any simple/easy/cheap way to recapture that energy? I mean if you could recapture 15% of the total energy, that sounds great. Forgive my ignorance, I seem to have it by the dump truck load.
If you have a way to convert spread-out heat from all the various parts generating it (cells, controller, wiring, motor) back into electricity you could use it to stick back into the battery pack.
The problem is recovering that energy in a way that doesn't cause it to be trapped within any of those components (so you can't just enclose them in something to catch it), or else they could be (probably would be) damaged by the heat.
You can use, for instance, liquid cooling in the controller, battery, and motor, each with their own loop, pump, and recovery system (because they will be at different temperatures and you don't want to heat up ones that are cooler, with the heat from hotter ones).
Then the liquid loop of each one is pumped to some device that creates electricity from heat. None of the methods I know anything about are very efficient. Peltiers, Stirling engines to operate a generator, etc.
At the least, the system would have to generate enough electricity at the endpoint after all losses to make up for the energy used up in the pumps, etc. I don't know how much that would be.
A fair bit of the heat is going to be "lost" to the environment before it can be captured; so I don't know how much you'll have to work with for energy salvage.
