I recently used a website called Wholesale Solar to calculate the cost of [whole house] solar. I think anybody who owns an EV or plugin Prius should get solar. By my calculations a grid-connected solar roof would drop your electric bill to zero, and the savings would payoff the roof in 3-4 years. It makes me wonder why more owners don't do it.
Chou have it wrong The solar roof has nothing to do with hybrid. It's just powers a fan to cool the interior a bit while the car is parked on a sunny hot spot
Solarizing your home makes sense whether you have an EV or not. It really makes no difference in terms of savings, since in most areas, if you overproduce, you get credit from the utility at retail, and only get billed for the net usage over a month. As far as the EV goes, you are going to charge it at night when you're not producing solar power anyway.
Does a typical home solar array use batteries for the dark hours, or no? Either way, if you produce excess during the day, you have a credit you can use when charging via the grid, at night.
This post is confusing because it seems to be referring to the solar car roof option on some Prii. However, Troy is talking about putting a solar roof on your house. Economics for putting a solar roof on your house are going to depend on the incentives and programs your state/utility offers (Va. offers none basically). If your state (Ca.) is paying incentives out the wazoo for EV and solar, then I agree it starts to make sense. What makes sense to me is Plug-In Prius PiP#2 with inductive charging, and then I might put a smaller solar panel on the house with 12v battery array to charge the PiP2 off-grid.
I still wonder if that 12 volt array would be necessary. What I mean: if you're away from the house all day, and your solar panels are making way more than you need, it's taken by the electrical company serving your area, no? And you're getting a credit for this surplus electricity. This is assuming you're not independent, still using both home solar and grid. Then when charging a car at night, even though you need to use the grid, it's costing you little or nothing, as you use that credit.
But the 'purists' say you can't claim to have carbon free EV miles that way. Even though you may have prevented to use of more fossil fuel electric during the day than you use at night, you still may have used some to charge the car.
Virginia is not favoring home solar (yet), so AFAIK we get no pay back for giving back to the grid. That type of deal is basically a state-subsidy to encourage home solar. Also we make a lot of short trips during the day, so my idea is when you pull the garage your are getting charged up at any time. "pipe" dream at the moment we have no PiP2 from Toyota and I don't know if the induction option will be affordable and if it could be powered from batts w/ inverter.
