4 ms·

How much panel surface would you need to drive an EV, say, 100 miles a week?

• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  A Tesla does about 4 miles per kw, give or take. So 100 miles would use about 25 KWH. Typical solar panel setups for domestic usage are around 3-4 KW. So depending on the season, you could get to 25KWH in a single day in the summer and you might struggle to get there in a week in the winter. All depends on you latitude, cloud coverage, etc. If you are in the north of Scottland, probably not a great plan in the winter but fantastic yields in the summer due to the long days.
• vel0city 5y ago
  This will need to make some assumptions based on how many good hours of solar generation you get. This will vary quite a bit based on latitude and season. Assuming you get ~6 hours of good generation a day on average, charging 7 days a week means you'll get 42 hours of good solar power output. Depending on your EV car, your driving habits, etc you might get ~4mi/kWh. So for 100mi, you're looking at 25kWh to get your 100mi weekly range. So over the course of 42 weekly hours, you'll need to come up with 25kWh. 25,000Wh / 42 hours converts to ~595.24W. So you'll want about 600W of generation capacity. Modern PV cells usually get ~150W per square meter, so 600 W / 150 W/m^2 = 4 m^2. You'll probably want to add a bit of additional overhead to deal with the weeks where you don't get quite a much sun and also with some of the losses in the system. As an additional note, this is only really thinking about the "peak" hours in the system. You'll get a few more hours a day charging at a lot of latitudes. This can also vary a decent bit based on the layout of your solar array.