I’m all for consumer choice, but the Democrat regime wants to eliminate choice and ram EVs down everyone’s throats. It seems to me that the circumstances under which an EV is actually superior to an ICE are very limited. Plus the flexibility that you have with a gas car is lost with an EV if you decide to operate it outside the limited envelope of quotidian circumstances in which it is superior.
If you don’t mind, I have a question about your solar. How do you power your house at night and long stretches of cloudy weather. I foolishly bought an all electric house 50 + years ago and lived there about 5 years and I still remember the big fat power bills and worse, the inability of the hvac system to heat the place higher than low 70’s on cold winter nights. Are you still tied to the grid , do you have battery storage, or do you have a backup generator?
I also remember reading about the solar experiment done on the Ithaca public library. Bottom line was that it never got close to breaking even on cost. I got my degree in biochemistry and physical chemistry from Cornell, so I know what Ithaca weather is like - cold and cloudy in the winter. Though in the last 20 or so years I’ve been doing statistical analyses and computer modeling I still remember enough thermodynamics to question the efficiency claims the EV fanboys make for their pet cause.
Combination of a 92kWh battery array, Alabama climate, and energy improvements to my house (caulking cracks, added insulation, replaced both my A/C and gas furnace with a variable speed heat pump and air handler, replaced my gas water heater with a hybrid water heater). In Alabama most of my power consumption (before I got the EV, charging it is now the big thing) is with cooling the house -- more so in the day since that's when it's the hottest, which is when solar is good. During the cloudy/rainy days the temperature is mild -- on those days I need little power to fight the climate. So even if I have to pull from the grid it's not much. The same for in the winter -- not always, but usually when it's pretty cold (cold to us Alabamians) it's also sunny which means I get enough free solar power to charge my batteries to make it at least halfway through the night on free power before pulling from the grid. So I'm still tied to the grid and pull power from it when needed (thus 18% of my power is not free - I pull from the grid that much on average through the year). I have no backup generator. Count the grid as my backup.
For details on how I calculate the payoff see https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4127577/posts?page=51#51. That post is about half a year old and, thus, the numbers are off a little. But the overall gist is the same. For example, in that post I said that I was out of pocket $3,200. 7 months later the overall energy project has saved me $1,900 in my cash flow (read: less I've had to pull from my retirement investments just to keep up with energy cost inflation minus costs of the project). Keep in mind that none of that payoff involves selling power to the grid. I haven't exported power onto the grid, but I am currently looking into doing so because it seems favorable to the tune of about $200/year (they'd pay me $200 more than the extra charges they'd put on me).
For me, a success with solar and the EV is not being able to go off-grid. That'd be cost prohibitive. Success to me means the energy and car portion of my budget keeps operating like it's mostly year 2019 energy costs. So I'll accept the fact that I have to buy at least a little power from the grid as long as it's not much. (With me having to pull from the grid only 1/5th the power we need, the Dims' stupid energy inflation impacts my budget only 1/5th as much.)
Another thing I did to increase efficiency is put on my software engineer hat and do a little project engineering. For example, my hybrid water heater has two air ducts. One air duct lets it draw incoming air from the attic (read: usually really warm air) so that the water heater's heat pump doesn't have to run as long to find the heat it needs to warm the water tank. The other air duct is coming from the water heater and is connected during the winter months to blow the cold air to the attic (away from the living quarters I'm trying to keep warm). During the warm 8 months of the year I remove that duct and let the cold air from the water heater be drawn in by the air receiver in the floor that uses the home HVAC to spread that free cold air around the house (reducing how often my home variable speed heat pump has to increase it's power consumption). Plus, since my variable speed heat pump, with its variable speed air handler, is almost always running even at low speed, at any point in the day that the water heater runs and produces free cold air, that free cold air will be utilized by the central HVAC. (Unlike a standard AC unit that's sometimes on, sometimes off, and may miss that free cold air from the water heater.) In other words, not only is the water heater efficient autonomously, the same for the home heat pump being efficient, but the two together work better than the sum of their parts.
I also usually charge the EV at 5.6kW (the lowest setting for Level 2 charging). By having my three main home appliances (EV charging and AC and water heater) usually drawing little power it's rare than the sum total of my power load from all appliances exceed the 18kW continuous AC power that my inverters are able to provide from DC power. In other words, it's rare that the immediate load requires my inverters to pull from the grid. (again the system as a whole working better than the sum of the parts).
Last but not least is how we usually charge the EV: with two 240V NEMA 14-50 outlets (dryer outlets). One EV charging outlet is continuously powered like all the other outlets in the house by being tied to the main electrical panel. The other EV outlet is tied to an intermittently powered electrical panel that's powered by my inverters only when my home batteries are charged at least 70% (configurable). In other words, when the home batteries are charged enough to power my home through the night without pulling power from the grid, I direct any excess power beyond that to the intermittent panel (and its intermittent EV charging outlet). If we come home in the EV with little range left, we plug it into the continuous powered outlet (read: always on, but not always free). If we come home with plenty of range left for the next day (my wife asks for 120 miles or higher), we plug the EV into the intermittent outlet (read: not always on, but always free power). Since my wife is retired and I'm quasi-retired, when I do work it's usually at home, the EV is often home in the middle of the day (read: good time of day for solar). So sometimes we come home in the afternoon and the intermittent outlet charges the EV for a while but shuts off before reaching 80%. Then if the EV is still plugged the next day, it'll charge some more when my home solar batteries reach the 70% trigger point. End result: when the EV is charged to 80% (recommended topping off point for daily driving) it gets about 230 miles with local driving speed and A/C use. That's about 110 miles between the 230 miles top and the 120 miles floor that is our catalyst for charging with constant power. If driving 40 to 50 miles per day local driving on a normal day, that means we'd have to go 3 days in a row of bad weather (read: not charged with free solar power) from the last topping off day to the point where we charge the EV with continuous power (read: charge it from the outlet that may result in adding to our power bill). That does happen occasionally, but not often.
I was able to figure most of this in May of last year on the 1-year anniversary of having solar (but before I got the EV). My inverter exports good telemetry in 5-minute candles. I made a C# app to import that data into a homemade SQL Server db so I could study the data like I do for my work (back end programmer, it'd be a stretch to call me a data analyst but I know enough to be dangerous). I also downloaded the past year's weather reports for the nearby airport into a table. From that I'm able to query and build reports on how often my batteries drained ("drained" to me means 30% charge left since that's the floor I set before pulling from the grid), how many hours in the night they were drained, how many hours they were fully charged, how much my total load was, how bursty the load was (really high for 30 minutes, before dropping down), etc. That was when I had half the solar I had now (call it Phase I) that I had for a year to ensure it worked as well as anticipated before upgrading to the full Phase II I wanted in the end (completed 13 months ago in August 2022) and, since it was time to replace my wife's car anyway, get an EV (done June 2022).
So to answer your question how I was able to achieve a good break even point -- a lot of it has to do with knowing what your exact power consumption habits are so you can meet most of them by taking advantage of the law of conservation in the exact areas of a solar system (i.e. I needed twice the solar panel throughput, but 3 times the battery capacity) , without going too far and running into the law of diminishing returns. (i.e. I should just accept the fact that every winter there's always one month with bad cold snaps and I have to buy about 60% of my power from the grid that month, but it's only 1 month out of the year so don't spend a lot to improve that one month.)