Electric auto purchasers said they’re purchasing solar panels to support their new, electricity-intensive driving habits.

The first in the most recent wave of plug-in electric cars rolled out last year in San Diego County, an all-electric car from Nissan, followed a month later by Chevy’s mostly electric Volt.

Whilst there’s no challenging information for Volt owners, forty % of Leaf owners have solar panels, according to the California Center for Sustainable Power, a San Diego non-profit. Owners achieved through the North County Times stated they made the decision on solar panels in the same time they made the decision on electrical automobiles, each to minimize their contributions to international warming and to offset the extra electricity they’d have to buy for their new automobiles.

“We wanted to go electrical mainly because it’s green and all that,” said Rosa Enriquez, a teacher together with the Vista Unified School District. “But we went solar also since our electrical costs had been so large  hundreds and hundreds of bucks.”

For consumers like Enriquez, the “going green” aspect originates from the reduction in greenhouse-gas production that includes emissions-free solar power, which then is utilized to run an electrical automobile, by itself an improvement on gasoline-burners in terms of greenhouse effect.

“When a person goes solar and buys an electrical car, they essentially have their own gasoline station on their roof,” said Daniel Sullivan, founder of Sullivan solar energy in San Diego.

A lot of owners also stated they’d arrive out ahead fiscally, many thanks for the way California utilities bill for power.

The cost of electricity in California escalates as customers’ usage passes usage plateaus. Possessing an electric vehicle not merely adds to complete utilization, however it also puts more clients into probably the most high priced tiers of electricity.

Employing solar panels to generate electrical power and pump it back again in to the grid enables customers to lessen their usage, and to spend a lower charge for that energy they use, decreasing their payments.

San Diego Gas & Electrical Co. would prefer auto proprietors use an alternate billing system in which the proprietors pay out for power priced on when it’s utilized. Electrical power utilised within the middle of the day, when it’s most needed in offices and factories, costs probably the most, even though power at night is the cheapest, said SDG&E spokesman Art Larson.

Consumers have the option of putting their whole house, including the solar power generation, into a time-of-use billing system. Their solar panels would develop power within the mid-afternoon, when the sun is brightest and electrical power the most high priced, and they would, SDG&E hopes, charge their cars at night, when electrical energy is cheapest, Larson said.

SDG&E is working with another company called Ecotality Inc. to test three different pricing schemes that make the daytime-night-time contrast much more or less extreme.

Electric car owners can also choose a hybrid scheme in which they install a second meter specifically for time-of-use billing for their electric vehicles, even though the house would remain on the traditional tier system.

Installing a meter and charger can be expensive, as significantly as $3,500 total, plus another $1,000 for a charger, according to Mark Ferry, transportation program manager for that Center for Sustainable Energy. In San Diego, a thousand buyers are participating in a federally funded program that pays all of those expenses.