As brilliant as EVs are, most owners end up getting their first bill thinking: ‘Convenience wonderful, but I wasn’t quite expecting that to cost that.’ The same will happen to solar panel owners when they get their first electricity bill. The numbers are all moving in the right direction, of course. Electric motoring costs are coming down all the time – they’re already dramatically lower than petrol – and electricity prices are increasing. So the differential is narrowing. Not as slowly as oil prices, perhaps, but slowly. Which brings us to solar panels.

Solar and EVs seem to have been destined for each other. The generation from domestic solar panels produces most electricity during daylight, just the times when most people get home from work and charge their cars. So why not simply feed that surplus energy into the car’s battery rather than sell it to the grid at a loss? It makes perfect sense to do just that. The payback is quick, the savings exponential, especially once the ratio of miles driven to unit of energy consumed begins to fall as EV tech improves. For Dorset Solar Panels, contact https://solarpanelsdorset.co.uk/solar-panels

A sunny day’s worth of energy from solar panels can feed a car’s battery as well as a home’s lighting. An average EV needs between 15 and 20 kilowatt hours to propel it 60 to 80 miles. A decent domestic solar panel installation on a reasonable day can feed that and more. Not every day, of course, not in the depths of December with five hours of late winter sun, but across a British year the contribution is important and the savings are real. And with a home battery bank, the picture improves still further. A surplus of kilowatts generated from the solar panels during the day can charge the car during the night, and if there’s any spare, that can be stored for later in the week. Again, it makes perfect sense to do just that.