What does energy nirvana look like? To me, it’s cheap, clean power, straight from your roof instead of fossil fuels or the monopoly grid. This vision may seem far off… but it’s already here today. Here’s a fun example.
Yesterday I tried the new ‘Solar Express Car Wash‘ down the street from us. It’s your standard drive-through car wash, but with an 82 kilowatt solar array on the roof (180 solar panels). As we whooshed and gurgled through the various washes, rinses and blow dries, I was like a kid again, enjoying the water-park vibe. And did I mention… solar powered!
Why do I think this car wash is so cool? So many reasons.
It’s an awesome design.
The building, designed by dsa architects, is not only functional but beautiful. It takes maximum advantage of its north-south orientation and elongated footprint to maximize solar surface area. And it’s a tip of the hat to the sawtooth style factories common during the industrial revolution (pre-electric-lighting) that were designed to keep heat out (from the south) while letting natural light in (from the north).
It matches on-site supply and demand perfectly.
Often you need a battery to shift solar power to when it’s needed later in the day. And batteries are getting very cheap. But most car washing gets done while the sun is shining between 10 and 5pm. And on weekends, Solar Express Car Wash’s ‘popular times’ chart (from Google) looks a lot like a solar production curve:
So Solar Express can actually serve most of their power demand straight from the roof, no batteries required. But how much power is that?
According to Chat GPT, the typical modern tunnel-style automatic car wash pulls about 20-40 kilowatts of continuous power, peaking at 40-80 kilowatts. So with the sun shining on an 82 kilowatt rooftop array, it can all be powered by solar! Here’s a list of the machines in a typical tunnel-style car wash, and how much power (in kW) they each draw:
It’s a massive competitive advantage.
In California, with our high electricity rates, energy costs for tunnel-style car washes can be as high as 20% of total operating costs, which run $5-7 per car (Solar Express Car Wash charges $13 for a basic wash). So at $1.50 per car for electricity, serving 150,000 cars per year, that’s $225,000 in electricity costs per year (and rising fast).
Now consider Solar Express Car Wash, which probably spent around $200,000 to build their 82 kilowatt solar system ($2.50 per watt installed). Perhaps a bit more if they also added batteries to shift some power to the late afternoon hours.
Their system will likely pay itself back in just over a year, and then their annual energy costs are zero. That’s a massive, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year advantage over competitors. It lets Solar Express Car Wash offer better prices and cheaper memberships, and/or be more profitable.
Not to mention that some customers might like the eco-friendliness.
It’s backup power in an emergency.
Solar Express Car Wash is essentially a big power plant with a big parking lot on a high-traffic artery in earthquake country. During a prolonged grid outage, they could use their array to provide backup power to first responders, mobile health clinics, etc., and for emergency vehicle charging. Right now they’re probably not set up to do this, but that could (and should) change quickly.
Thanks for existing, Solar Express Car Wash!
I can’t wait to see more solar-powered businesses (and cool designs) like this. They represent the distributed energy future, which is coming faster than you think (and whether you want it or not).
We’ve been washing our cars at home for years, but from now on, we’ll be regular customers of this big clean energy machine. Thanks, Solar Express Car Wash!
Built by Berkeley’s own Sun Light and Power, developing solar power projects since 1976…
Didn’t realize this was new. Thought it had been here for years. I only recently started washing my car a year ago (when we bought a (non-tesla) EV and retired the Prius to a friend). Mainly decided to go to car wash for water saving. But I loved that our closest car wash is solar powered. Had no idea how much the supply might match the demand so this post answered all kinds of questions I had. Thanks!