I myself find it SHOCKING!

That's not very nice. And rather unwarranted.

You must have hated that 80s band then.

U.S. use 25% of the world's oil
75% of the oil we import is used for transportation

U.S. stops importing oil then the price of oil will likely take a nose dive. That means less money for countries that fund terrorism. OPEC can go **** themselves.

so ........ yea, getting cars off oil/gas(heading that way) is the right direction. imo.

I'm holding out for a Mr. Fusion.

Best part is he's originally from South Africa. Living the American dream.

Unfortunately that's not true, as much as I wish it was. PV cells have theoretical efficiency limits. It would take massive magical leaps in tech that no one has any clue about at this point for us to reach even 80%. That is just in THEORY... in real world production terms you will be lucky to see production of cells that can hit 60% in our lifetime. Of course that is a huge jump from what we have right now on the market.

So let's play with the numbers a bit... I'll give you a TRULY 50% efficient panel (which is completely made up and not likely to hit the market in any significant quantity for 20 years). Ok now let's look at how much energy is in sunlight. The best estimate for a sunny day is around 1KW/m2 per hour. So, now let's take into account the number of hours of sunlight per day average for an average American city.. about 5 hours(this varies WILDLY but mostly falls in the 4 to 6 range).

So that leaves us with a whopping 5KW/m2 per day. oops. but we need to cut that in half(50% efficiency) now we get 2.5KW/m2 per day.

Ok now let's go back to the Tesla. The average American drives 15000 miles a year. That comes out to 11 to 12 KW hours per day. So JUST to power your car you need about 5 m2 of solar panel (again, mythical super solar panels). 50 sq ft of panels just to run YOUR car.

I'm all about alternative energy and diversification... but solar is a really shitty source.

How efficient is the average panel right now?

That's hard to say. It can vary by A LOT from panel to panel. But 20% is a good guess for the very very very best shiny new commercial grade panels. And we are talking super high end crazy expensive stuff to get to 20%. Your average home panel is lucky to hit 16%.

This suggests the kind of exponential growth akin to Moore's Law:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graph...daily-chart-19

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that there is a theoretical limit to the efficiency of solar cells.

Now, if they are 20% efficient, does that mean that they are absorbing 20% of the incandescent energy from the sun? If so, how large of a panel would I need for a watt of energy?

Ahh Swanson's law, yes, I see no reason it won't remain true since it deals only in cost and not the tech aspect itself. I am not even looking at that side of things. Even if panels were super cheap they just don't provide much energy for the amount of space required and people don't consider that they have limited lifespans and other maintenance costs... but let's ignore that for now and focus on the tech.

The simple answer is that for 1 KILOWATT of energy per day(you can convert to watt if you want) you need 1 square meter of panel. Average solar energy for most cities is around 5KW per square meter per day. So at 20% efficiency you take 5 X .20 and get 1.

Now here is where it get's interesting.. let's give Teslas to the average two car family and add up their TOTAL HOUSEHOLD electrical energy usage per day. It comes out to around 60KWh per day. So you end up with 60 square meters or around 646 sq ft of solar panels to get to break even.

Learning the realities of solar panels is kinda depressing actually.

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30x20 of solar panels isn't that depressing. That would fit just fine on most roofs, wouldn't it?

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I wouldn't call 100 charging stations across the entirety of the US "blanketing". Two per state, really there will be entire states with no charging stations. This is whack.