We here at Whaling City Solar drive our own sunshine powered Chevy Volt and a Tesla Model Y, but we’re solar guys – so you’d expect that. If you haven’t heard, there’s going to be an electric Hummer from GMC released in 2021 – and boy is it a nice piece of hardware! The battery is expected to be a massive 200 kWh – that’s about what an average home uses over a six day period.
That’s pretty amazing that a vehicle who’s reputation has always been tied to it’s gas …well… guzzling engine, now has new life as a non-polluting electric vehicle.
There are four potential versions coming out per expert electric car website – electrek.co – with the first unit at $112,595 being launched first at the end of next year.
I think you can guess where we’re going with this. If you install solar panels, you can then tell everyone you’ve got a clean energy sunshine powered Hummer! But an important question is – how many solar modules do you need for you Hummer?
Here’s some math to help us figure it out together.
So, on average – Americans drive somewhere between 12,000 and 18,000 miles per year. If we stick right in the middle at 15,000 miles – that’s about 288 miles per week.
The engineers at GMC say the Hummer will get about 350 miles on that massive 200 kWh ‘tank’ of electricity. That means you’ll need about 8,500 kWhs of electricity per year for your new ride. Where’s that electricity going to come from? Simple answer is from the electric pole at your own house when you charge it each evening. The electric bill will go up for sure, but then again there’s no more stopping a the gas station.
South Coast Massachusetts homeowners pay 22¢ per kWh – so to fill up the 200kWh “tank” it cost about $44 of electricity. If you’re driving any sort of truck or SUV now, then you know that’s a good deal already.
So how can we get that $44 per tank down to $8? It’s solar power!
Since we’re already in math mode, here’s another equation. It’s a way to calculate the cost per kilo-watt hour for a newly installed solar system so we can compare the costs vs. powering it from the street.
We’ve got another article in our learning center about this equation, but here’s the punchline. When you install a solar power system in Massachusetts, installed by yours truly at Whaling City Solar, your price of electricity is less than 4¢ per kWh.
That means your Hummer’s full tank of solar electricity will cost $7.40. That ain’t bad at all.
Finally, we want to answer the question on how many panels we need to generate the 8,500 kWhs needed to power your Hummer for the year. Again refer to learning center to see how we do the calculations, but the answer is that it can be generated by 20 solar panels that are 360 watts each.
The idea that 20 solar panels can fill up such a big car 1062 times over 25 years is pretty impressive.
Do you own an electric car already? Would you like to see us break down the cost to run it completely on solar? We’d love to write on article about it for you! Message Adam at adam@whalingcitysolar.com the model of your car and we’ll run the numbers so we can all learn together.
