Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Anyone with solar and a EV in the Vancouver region?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
As started in the subject line, I’m curious if anyone in the Vancouver region is running solar and an EV.

How long is ROI? Are you seeing good results or is it just too cloudy here to get a good ROI? Overall experiences/impressions? Size of system? How many Kms per year are you driving?

Anyone running with solar and energy storage?

I’m dreaming of doing a system, but as our electricity rates aren’t terribly, I’m worried I would never get close to ROI before moving several years down the road.
 
I have been interested in the same thing as I have a fairly large south facing roof on our house. I do enjoy a 220 charger in my garage for the model 3 so it would be entirely for environmental reasons to go this direction. Also the storage capacity of a solar system would be incentive. I have a friend here who lives off grid outside of town and charges his Model 3 with micro hydro setup, although at a 110 charge.
 
You should probably consider the solar system separate from the car, and calculate the car vs grid rates based on overnight charging.

We don't have a solar setup and the overnight rates in Ontario are pretty low, which is when we charge the car.

I have talked to a couple of solar installers here and for our place, while the aspect is good, the surface area would only be sufficient for about 3.5kW. Most of the installers I've talked to here don't want to bother with less than 5kW. :-/ The payback on the solar system alone would be on the order of 15 years against market rates. We don't plan to be here that long.

From an ROI perspective vs gasoline, I can give you some real world numbers. Over the last 5 1/2 years of driving BEVs we've done over 100,000 km. Given the price of regular gasoline here, at roughly 9L/100km (our old Mazda), our Smart ED has saved us roughly $2,500 per year after subtracting the electricity costs. Our TM3 would be somewhat lower than that rate, but has lots of other benefits. ;->

So just looking at the Smart, the car will be paid off in gasoline savings in about 4 more years. The first "free" car we've ever owned.

The Tesla would take about 3x longer to pay off, but you should probably be looking at the gas savings and the lower maintenance vs an ICE as icing, rather than a payoff. An ICE is always a money pit between the fuel, maintenance, depreciation and other considerations. The environmental benefits are obviously really important, but harder to quantify. The ROI vs a BMW 3 or C class vehicle is however vastly better, but still unlikely to net out to zero. The GHG delta would be paid off in about a year. The financial delta to a similarly priced car is probably already a wash, depending on how you value the feature balance between vehicles.

if you are able to charge the car in the day at home, and drive a lot at night, then the valuation w/ solar is likely to be a slam dunk. But I'd assume that's not the case.

The home storage would simply add to your capital outlay for the car and extend the payback period. Outage security and grid independence aside.

Not sure that was all that helpful. I'd certainly like EV+Solar+Powerwall myself. :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: 5_+JqckQttqck
BC is very different from Ontario with the electricity usage. We don’t have time of use (at least where I’m located) so time of day doesn’t matter.

We also pay a lot less overall compared to Ontario as far as I know. We are 2 step. Step one is .11c and step 2 is .13c

We are currently at about 7/1 ratio for fuel costs in an equivalent car because of such high fuel prices in Vancouver. I think we are currently at 1.60 per L of premium fuel. So it’s very quick to recoup fuel costs here when driving Electric.

To give you an idea. I’ve tracked about 13,000 kms on one of my apps and I’ve saved about $2100 already. I’m at about 17,000 kms and part of that time the fuel was up at almost 2$ a L which would put me at about $3000 in 9 months. I’ve almost covered my insurance cost through fuel savings alone.
 
I haven't looked at solar in much detail (one reason is I have large evergreen trees just south of my home that shade my roof a lot of the year), but my impression is it's not so great here in the Vancouver area. We get lots of clean hydro electricity at reasonable rates. New Westminster has a solar garden and I'd consider buying into something like that, but even then I'm not sure it's the best use of resources.

In the grand scheme of things, it would seem to be more efficient to have solar in places with a more suitable climate (California, Arizona, Texas etc. or maybe the Okanagan if you want to keep things in BC) and then "export" it.

Anyhow, it depends why you want solar. If it's to save money, I suspect the payback is extremely long term and it may be better to look at energy efficiency upgrades rather than energy generation. If it's for environmental reasons, our grid is already very clean.
 
Can you explain why you are connecting the Tesla and solar panels? Like @darkenergy, I am not sure why you are grouping them together. Assuming that your car is often away from home during the day then you won't be directly charging your car with your panels.

As you likely know, Vancouver isn't a great place for solar panels, see the map below. At least you are better than some parts of the province!
Solar-Energy-Map-Canada.jpg

Ontario currently is not much more expensive than what you show for BC - we range from about $0.11-$0.18 depending on time of day.
 
As started in the subject line, I’m curious if anyone in the Vancouver region is running solar and an EV.

How long is ROI? Are you seeing good results or is it just too cloudy here to get a good ROI? Overall experiences/impressions? Size of system? How many Kms per year are you driving?

Anyone running with solar and energy storage?

I’m dreaming of doing a system, but as our electricity rates aren’t terribly, I’m worried I would never get close to ROI before moving several years down the road.

This was in the news recently but he built a new efficient house.
Say goodbye to utility bills with a so-called 'passive house'
 
Thanks for sharing that link.

The wife and I are eventually planning to build such a house in the future. We’ve been doing lots of research on it.

A lot of the technology has been around for a while already now. BC is actually very far behind when it comes to passive houses. Our moderate climate has made us lazy I feel.

My mother’s house in Ontario was built in 1999 and it can run circles around most of what I see in BC as a current build.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes together in the future.
 
I wish I could find it now, but I recall reading a portion of a report recently that considered GHG benefit and financial benefit of solar electrical generation. The quick version is that there was not significant benefit. Of course, there are non-GHG environmental impacts of hydro electric generation.

Having said that, I was talking to someone from Sechelt on the weekend who said that there is a solar energy company on the Sunshine Coast that markets to Tesla owners.
 
I wish I could find it now, but I recall reading a portion of a report recently that considered GHG benefit and financial benefit of solar electrical generation. The quick version is that there was not significant benefit. Of course, there are non-GHG environmental impacts of hydro electric generation.

Having said that, I was talking to someone from Sechelt on the weekend who said that there is a solar energy company on the Sunshine Coast that markets to Tesla owners.

All green energy sources have some form of drawback. Key is to minimalize the impacts. Micro wind could be a thing on a local level.

Solar - high initial GHG / Materials footprint. Long payback timeline.
Hydro - displacement and changing natural environment. Can be disastrous if critical failure occurs.
Wind - kills birds, unsightly and prone to NIMBY protests.
Tidal - see above but with water creatures, hard to maintain as salt water = corrosion galore.
Geo-Thermal - digging holes in the ground has done more damage than not to our global GHG concentration.
Nuclear - Uranium can go boom; long half life. Thorium reactors are not main stream for power generation.