Driving on Sunshine

So I was reading this pieceposted today on the SolarCoin slack by Nick Gogerty... in particular this bit:

“With 1 m² of photovoltaics, it’s possible to drive 1,000 km per year with an electric car.”

Surely not? That sounds absurd!

A quick back of the envelope calculation, however, shows this to be completely true!

Check my maths:

My 12 panel 4kW system generated ~3600kWh of energy here in rainy England in 2017. Which is ~300kWh per panel - in line with the quote, the surface area of 1 panel is more or less 1 m².

A Tesla Model S with 100kWh hour battery has a range of ~300 to 500 km... so just one panel would indeed easily provide more than 1000km of driving (i.e. 3 x 300-500km)... if I had a Tesla*, of course :)

A simpler way of putting it would be my 3600kWh of generation could provide over 10,000 km of carbon free EV mobility which is, funnily enough, roughly the average distance driven annually here in the UK.

Step on it!

(*Or a public transit friendly BYD 'K9' electric busfor over 1800 miles!)