A Lebanese converts his car to solar energy to face the gasoline crisis

Young Ahmed Al-Safadi works in the maintenance of bicycles in the heart of the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon, and faces great difficulty in working and serving his customers to maintain their bicycles in the event of a power outage, which currently feeds the country for only two hours out of 24 hours a day.

In order to face the crisis of the high price of fuel and the frequent interruption of stations, Safadi tried to solve the problem in his own way, and converted his car, which was initially fueled with gasoline, to electricity, relying on 6 ordinary batteries originally intended for motorcycles.

However, with the frequent power outages, Safadi fitted his car with a panel of solar energy cells nearly the size of the car, to permanently dispense with the electric current that he was providing from private generators and the electricity of the Ministry of Energy and Water in Lebanon.
Safadi, 35, said in an interview with Sky News Arabia: “You have to move quickly to come up with new ideas to continue working and earning a living in the face of the crises that come your way.”

Al-Safadi spends most of his time in his workshop repairing bicycles, and uses the car to move around when needed, and during work times he connects the car’s electricity to the workshop so that his industrial tools also work on electrical energy derived from solar energy cells installed on its roof.

clean energy story

The story began when Al-Safadi bought a small used car that runs on gasoline, and after the high price of the gas canister, he removed the old engine from it, and said: “I provided it with an electric motor that is charged through the socket with household electric power, and I equipped it for this purpose with a set of small batteries that met the need completely. “.

But with the almost total power outage and the car’s engine stopping, it was necessary to find another way to develop the car to cope with crises and solve the problem of mobility from its foundation.

Al-Safadi resorted to installing a photovoltaic panel on the roof of the car, which draws energy from the sun to charge the battery system that runs his car.
He added: “When I use the car for a long distance on bright sunny days, it consumes energy only from the solar cell panel, and at the same time the six batteries in the car are charged, and I save the cost of subscribing to the private generators that drained most of my money during my daily work.”

He continued, “I prepared a place in front of the maintenance workshop to connect the car’s electricity generation device to the workshop, so that I could operate the electrical equipment that I used in my profession of repairing bicycles.”

Operation on the road

On the road, the car pushes its front wheels with the power shift lever for the wheels in two modes: fast and slow, and the weight of the car with its six batteries that takes its place in the rear of the car and the battery dedicated to the solar panel, is about 600 kilograms.

As for the cost of converting this car from working with gasoline to electricity and then solar energy, Safadi explained: “It amounted to about $3,000, including the base price of the car.”

He concluded by saying: “My next step is to convert a larger car to run on solar energy, and it may be a large family, because the difficult economic conditions seem to be continuing with the continued power outages and the significant rise in fuel prices. The price of a can of gasoline has now reached nearly 700 thousand pounds, which is what It is equivalent to the minimum wage in Lebanon, and half the salary of a state employee.