The Holy Grail for reducing your footprint: Driving on sunshine
Not many feelings can rival driving on sunshine — driving an electric vehicle powered by solar panels on your home. I finally achieved this holy grail of personal energy consumption this year. I’ve had a Chevy Bolt EV for a year and a half but finally got solar panels on my new home (pictured above).
Electric car fuel costs are typically about 1/3 of the cost for fuel for normal gasoline vehicles. But that comparison is based on mainland electricity prices. In Hawaii, where I live, we suffer under electricity prices about two or three times higher than the mainland. The result of our high prices is that driving an EV in Hawaii doesn’t yield much if any cost savings compared to a regular car — if we’re looking just at fuel costs.
That changes dramatically with home solar because the power from home solar is so much cheaper than grid power (my utility electricity is about 44 cents per kilowatt-hour for me, through HELCO). Hawaii has various solar programs that allow you to use the grid as a kind of battery. The payment amount for solar power sent to the grid has declined dramatically in the last few years, unfortunately, as programs have changed. New programs (Customer Grid-Supply Plus is the latest program offered by Hawaii utilities) pay the solar customer only the wholesale rate of power for solar power sent to the grid.
This lower payment for solar power sent to the grid provides more of an incentive to add batteries to your home-based system, because you can store any excess power at your house for later use, but that adds a lot of expense in most cases. There are a number of companies now, however, that will offer a no-upfront cost solar system that saves money from day one when compared to your utility bill, even when battery storage is included with your solar system. Do your homework carefully, but there are good companies offering good deals.
Even with Hawaii’s now more limited options for going solar (net metering was killed a few years ago in Hawaii), you’ll still save a ton compared to regular grid electricity prices. Most solar systems in Hawaii now pay for themselves in five years or so, depending on factors like your tax appetite and how large a system you install.
I enjoy watching my solar kilowatt-hours rack up on the daily production profile on my computer. It’s great entertainment in these strange times… Here’s my best day so far from my 4.35 kW system, from April 22, when my system produced 27.4 kWh in total.
The end result is that going solar and driving on sunshine yields significant cost savings over regular gasoline costs.
Not to mention the many other benefits of driving on sunshine, such as:
· Being kind to the environment (total emissions, even when using grid electricity, are far lower than from gasoline)
· Being kind to your own lungs (there are zero emissions from the car itself)
· Getting a much better car because EVs are such fun to drive
· Enjoying lower maintenance costs because there are so few moving parts in EVs
· Never having to get new brake pads again because most braking is done with regenerative charging
· Vastly improving your own resilience to disasters because you have your own basically infinite fuel supply for transportation
· Helping to improve the resilience of your community
· Quiet driving
Driving on sunshine is probably the biggest single thing you can do to reduce your environmental footprint. Happy Earth Day!
