Home Solar Power » Ask An Expert

atomxiao asked:

It t seats two and has a top speed of 90 kilometres an hour. When it arrived in Vancouver in early July, driven by a young Swiss adventurer and explorer of the future called Louis Palmer?http://www.new-energy-supply.com/0, who I’ll come to in a while, it had been driven 32,000 kilometres around the world, without using a drop of gas.

What does it run on? Pure sunshine, delivered free of charge to a small trailer with six square metres of photovoltaic cells. Louis calls it his “solar taxi” because he takes so many people for rides. It has turned heads wherever it goes and it has travelled from Europe to Saudi Arabia and to India, Bali (for the global climate conference), New Zealand, Australia (across the Nullarbor Plain), Singapore, Korea, China and to Vancouver. What does it cost? The car was custom-made so it’s impossible to tell, but similar, small electric vehicles sell for under $20,000.

And the running cost? If it were a regular car, burning 10 litres per 100 kilometres (28 miles per gallon in Canada), with gas at $1.50 a litre, the fuel would have cost $4,800 for the 32,000 km.

However, because it is a solar car, we need a different kind of calculation. Please don’t stop reading if you don’t like math; these are the new calculations we need to get used to.

The car uses 8 kilowatt-hours of electricity (kWh) per 100 km – we use the capital W because the Watt is named after James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the modern steam engine. If you took the power from BC Hydro, at 6.5 cents per kWh, it would cost you $165, or $1 for every 194 kilometres.

Get used to the shock. That’s what a lightweight electric vehicle costs to run. An average annual driving distance of 15,000 km would cost you $78 or $1.50 a week – less if you reduce your driving by using a bike or bus.

This is a solar car?http://www.new-energy-supply.com/?, however, so we need some additional math. The car’s trailer carries an 850 Watt solar system. You can buy an installed 1,000 Watt system for $8,000, so 850 Watts will cost you $6,800. The solar cells will produce power for 35 years or more, but they’re guaranteed for 25 years so we’ll use that number. If you pay for it on a six percent 25-year mortgage, your monthly payment will be $44 or $1.45 a day; that’s 3.5 cents per kilometre. That is the price of driving a small, solar electric car. Welcome to the future. And while the price of gas will rise every month as the world’s oil supply disappears, the price of solar will fall, due to mass production and increases in solar efficiency.

Pessimists and cynics of the world hide your heads. This is a car that runs on sunshine, and the sun is good for another five billion years, whereas the oil – that stored ancient sunshine from long, long ago – will be gone in 31 years. An estimated 1,000 billion barrels remain and we’re using 32 billion barrels a year. Ah, but Brazil has just discovered a “huge” oil field, with 33 billion barrels so make that 32 years.