For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.