I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year

Travers Solar in Alberta generates about 2.5TWh a year from under 14 sqkm.

Build 30 of them and that's 400 sqkm.

A 20sqkm by 20sqkm solar plant would power every car and light van in Canada forever (setting aside seasonality).

Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

That's less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of the land in Alberta alone.

(Of course you wouldn't put it in one location, it would be spread out across the country)

Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)

You'd have a lot of excess power in the summer -- you'd be generating 650TWh of excess power a year

> Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

Or, convert the solar energy to heat, then back to electricity at 40% round trip efficiency. Needs only 2.5x the solar (or less, because some solar goes directly to the users without long term storage). The heat is very storable at scale, even for seasonal storage.

> Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)

Please also consider land for biofuel/biodiesel.

1 in 3 acres of Canadian canola (amounting to roughly 7 million acres of farmland) goes directly into producing feedstock for the global and domestic biofuel markets. https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/daily/conservatives-diesel-...

For 7 million acres (Canadian acres - 16% Capacity Factor)

Annual Electricity Generation (16% CF): ~4,467 Terawatt-hours (TWh/year)

National Scale Comparison:~7.4× Canada's total annual electricity consumption (~600 TWh/year)

Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office. Actual average car use is closer to 25,000km/year (15,000 miles is the us average). But cars are not all road users. The "100 teslas/hour" standard is to accomidate trucks too.

If you are planning infrastructure like highways, national averages are irrelevant. It is the same debate that Hertz had when it dropped teslas: charging infrastructure is local and rental car locations (airports) cannot support the needed power density.