Sun and power, measured.
Two questions, answered with real numbers for your city: is an electric car worth it, and do solar panels pay for themselves? Every figure starts from open European data, and every assumption is written down.
Where does a solar panel produce the most? See all 636 cities on the solar map
Cities covered
636
across 27 EU countries
Best solar yield
1,698 kWh
per kWp a year in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
Cheapest electricity
€0.108
per kWh in Hungary
Most expensive electricity
€0.404
per kWh in Ireland
The electric car question
A cheap kWh at home and an expensive one at a motorway rapid charger are not the same purchase, so the calculator asks how you would actually charge and prices each share of it separately. It then works out the annual mileage at which the car pays for its price premium, using the electricity and pump prices published for your country.
- Cost per 100 km, side by side with petrol or diesel
- The mileage where the total cost of ownership breaks even
- Emissions using your country's grid intensity, not an EU average
The solar question
Panel output is taken from PVGIS for your city, at the angle that suits it best or at your own roof's slope and direction, not a national average. The harder question is how much of that output you use yourself rather than exporting cheaply, so the calculator makes that assumption explicit and lets you move it.
- Month-by-month production against your own consumption
- Payback, internal rate of return and levelised cost over 25 years
- What changes when you add a battery, or charge a car at home
Why the numbers differ by city
Southern Europe gets roughly twice the solar yield of the far north for the same panel, and household electricity prices across the EU differ by more than a factor of three. Those two facts do not point the same way: expensive electricity makes solar pay back faster, cheap electricity makes an electric car cheaper to run, and the sunniest countries are not the most expensive ones. Which is why a single European answer to either question is not much use.