SolarCity Produced Electricity On March 22 That Could Have Charged Every Tesla… Well, Sort Of
Originally published on EV Obsession.
SolarCity’s total installed solar photovoltaic system network produced enough electricity on March 22 to power all of Tesla’s current fleet of more than 107,000 electric vehicles, according to a recent blog post on SolarCity’s website.
To be more specific, the blog post stated that the company’s customers’ solar photovoltaic (PV) systems generated more than 8 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity on March 22.
The reference to Tesla’s fleet assumes that there are ~107,000 Teslas on the road now (which are actually reported Model S sales through the end of 2015, so a bit lower than the ~122,000 sold through Q1 2016), and the calculations are based on the base 70 kWh battery-pack. To give a better idea of scale here, SolarCity currently has around 230,000 customers. So, not quite enough for each customer to fully charge a Model S. Perhaps the Model 3 will be a different story (as it will possess a smaller base battery pack)?
The blog post provides more:
Together, they have produced billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity that have powered their neighborhoods, businesses, municipal buildings, and even US military bases. And just a couple weeks ago, SolarCity customers had their biggest day of energy generation yet — surpassing 8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity production in a single day.
Just how much is 8 million kilowatt-hours? How about putting it in terms of something else that’s been on people’s minds lately — Tesla electric vehicles. That’s a lot of joy rides. According to the EPA, a fully charged Tesla Model S has a range of about 234 miles — roughly the driving distance from Washington DC to New York (coincidentally, both are places where solar power is taking off!).
While that is impressive, it seems unlikely that SolarCity’s growth will keep pace with Tesla’s — so this is probably the last time that a claim like this will be made. Well, that’s what I would guess anyways.
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