Solar Power Electric Vehicule Charging

If you’ve come this far, it’s because you’ve asked yourself two key questions about electric vehicles: Can I produce fuel for electric vehicles at home? Can you use solar panels to charge electric vehicles? Well the answer to both questions is yes.

While it is true that the new 2.0 TD electricity tariff has been developed to promote electric vehicles, the truth is that charging your vehicle using solar panels will always be much more profitable.

Charging speed and contracted power

As for an electric vehicle, two aspects must be taken into account: contracted power and charging speed.

In relation to the contracted power, surely you will have to increase the power to be able to charge your vehicle. The amount of power you need will depend on the characteristics of the vehicle, the different charging speeds it has, as well as the needs we want to cover and our consumption habits at home.

Therefore, the question of the contracted power can be reduced to the time we have to load our vehicle and the kilometers we want to load. The more kilometers we want to load in less time, the more energy we will need, that is, the more “contracted power”.

The contracted power is one of the aspects in which the generation of photovoltaic energy has nothing to do, at least at the residential level. Photovoltaic solar panels generate electricity during a sunny day, energy that can be considered as instantaneous power, it is added to the agreed power in the home at that time, but is affected by the day-night cycle. Already the weather conditions.

In this sense, the installation of a solar panel will have nothing to do with reducing power, but with a great saving in electricity consumption for charging your vehicle.

How much does electric fuel cost?

Charging 120 kilometers in an electric car can mean an average daily cost in electricity bills of around € 3.5, depending on the type of rate and the hours in which we charge the car. In this sense, if we charge the vehicle in the off-peak hours of the hourly discrimination, the charge will be cheaper.

After a month, the bill will increase by an average of 105 euros, which will cost approximately 1,260 euros per year. This is the most “extreme” situation for the use of electric vehicles.

In fact, the average distance that Spanish citizens travel by car each day is about 30 kilometers. Therefore, to charge an electric car for 30 kilometers, we will need about 6 kWh per day, while the trickle charge is 2.3 kWh. You can recharge the car in two and a half hours, which means that the daily cost is about 0.62 euros per day. day. In one month, your electricity bill can increase by 18.75 euros or 225 euros a year.

On the other hand, charging the car during the day will cost us about 0.14 euros / kWh (VAT included). In other words, depending on the loading time of the day and the electricity bill stipulated in the contract, the cost of refueling the car can double.

We start from a consumption at home of € 94 per month or € 1,127 per year in electricity bills. If we are in the case in which a driver needs to load 120 km a day in the car, the bill can increase by € 105 per month, assuming that, per year, a total of € 2,387 would be paid in electricity bills.

It would be enough to install 14 plates of 270 Wp for a total installed power of 3.78 kWp, to cover around 90% of the vehicle’s fuel and to be able to save 58% of the bill or € 1,384 per year.

Accumulation systems and electric car

While it is true that charging a battery to charge another battery is somewhat inefficient due to the losses in transformation. However, you can take advantage of the photovoltaic installation to add solar batteries and not only obtain electricity for your vehicle but also for the general consumption of the home.

If an accumulation system with lithium batteries (similar to batteries in electric vehicles) is added to a photovoltaic installation, we will have the possibility of taking advantage of the energy surplus produced by the plates, also having energy at night.