Today I was driving to the grocery store and I noticed a home had 32 PV solar panels on the roof. Also, as the garage door was open, it was easy to see that the home also had a Tesla Electric Car. So this seems to be an example of an American going bigtime Green right!??

So if we take the average sunlight hours per day for this home in Palo Alto, California which is about 5.4 hrs/day. And multiply it by the 32 solar panels (32 X200)= 6400 watt * 5.4 hrs = 34.56 kwh/day DC and then when we take that into AC with the expected energy loss of about 15% that would equal about 29 kwh/day of electricity being produced.

So the big question is, would this be sufficient electricity to run an electric car? Well we would need to know how many miles we wanted to go right? Well, Tesla Motors website talks about roughly 4 miles per kwh. So, that would mean that the 29 kwh from the solar system might be able to get the car to drive about 120 miles/day…

That doesn’t seem to be too bad. Either way, congrats to the man who is going solar and doing an electric vehicle at the same time.