ENERGY: Electric car owners prone to going solar

Electric car buyers 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 vehicle from Nissan, followed a month later by Chevy's mostly

electric Volt.

While there's no hard data for Volt owners, 40 percent of Leaf owners have solar panels,

according to the California Center for Sustainable Energy, a San Diego nonprofit. Owners

reached by the North County Times said they decided on solar panels at the same time they

decided on electric cars, both to reduce their contributions to global warming and to offset

the extra electricity they'd have to buy for their new vehicles.

"We wanted to go electric because it's green and all that," said Rosa Enriquez, a teacher

with the Vista Unified School District. "But we went solar also because our electric bills

were so high ---- hundreds and hundreds of dollars."

For customers like Enriquez, the "going green" element comes from the reduction in

greenhouse-gas production that comes with emissions-free solar power, which then is used to

run an electric car, itself an improvement on gasoline-burners in terms of greenhouse impact.

"When a person goes solar and buys an electric car, they essentially have their own gas

station on their roof," said Daniel Sullivan, founder of Sullivan Solar Power in San Diego.

Many owners also said they'd come out ahead financially, thanks to the way California

utilities bill for power.

The price of electricity in California escalates as customers' consumption passes usage

plateaus. Owning an electric car not only adds to total usage, but it also puts more

customers into the most expensive tiers of electricity.

Using solar panels to generate electricity and pump it back into the grid allows customers to

reduce their usage, and to pay a lower rate for the power they use, lowering their bills.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. would prefer car owners use an alternate billing system in which

the owners pay for power priced on when it's used. Electricity used in the middle of the day,

when it's most needed in offices and factories, costs the most, while power at night is the

cheapest, said SDG&E spokesman Art Larson.

Customers have the option of putting their whole house, including the solarpower generation,

into a time-of-use billing system. Their solar panels would produce power in the mid-

afternoon, when the sun is brightest and electricity the most expensive, and they would,

SDG&E hopes, charge their cars at night, when electricity is cheapest, Larson said.

SDG&E is working with another company called Ecotality Inc. to test three different pricing

schemes that make the daytime-nighttime contrast 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, while the house would

remain on the traditional tier system.

Installing a meter and charger can be expensive, as much as $3,500 total, plus another $1,000

for a charger, according to Mark Ferry, transportation program manager for the Center for

Sustainable Energy. In San Diego, a thousand customers are participating in a federally

funded program that pays all of those expenses.

"Ecotality only agreed to put in the second meter two or three months ago, and that was

because of solar customers," Ferry said.

SDG&E holds personal meetings with electric vehicle customers to help them figure out the

optimal program, but Ferry said not everyone chooses based on finances.

"Some people want to generate enough solar energy to cover 100 percent of their electric

needs, even if from an economic view that doesn’t make sense for them," he said.

Glen Rhoades, a retiree in Carlsbad, has his Volt, but construction won't start on his 4.5

kilowatt solar generator for two weeks. At the moment, he's still on a traditional tier

system, and his bill, which included expensive lighting for his fish aquariums, ratcheted up

to $550 last month.

But he upgraded his lighting system with more efficient bulbs, which he hopes will

dramatically lower his bill when combined with the solar system. Also, once he's had a chance

to talk to his solar installer, he hopes to switch to time-of-use pricing, to tap lower night

rates.