EVs, Solar Panels Combine to Boost Sentiment for Sustainability in US Households

Analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has revealed that electric vehicle owners are more likely to install solar panels at home. On the other hand, the analysis discovered that having solar panels at home does not increase a homeowner’s chances of buying an electric car.

NREL polled 869 households in the San Francisco Bay Area and used this information as the survey’s main data source. According to Axios, the Bay Area leads the entire country in EV use with a 50% EV adoption rate. Electric vehicle owners are much more likely to install home solar panels to cut down on home-energy costs as they primarily charge their EVs at home.

While recharging an electric car generally costs less than refueling an internal combustion engine car, home solar panels can help EV owners reduce their charging costs even further by limiting the amount of energy they draw from the grid.

Shivam Sharda, a computational research scientist and NREL’s Center for Integrated Mobility Services says electric vehicles and solar panels “have a complementary nature” that may help improve energy systems resiliency and address concerns about power-management strategies and energy grid stability.

The survey involved a multi-institutional team of scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of California Santa Barbara and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Bingron Sun. Janet L. Ryena and Venu M. Garikapati from NREL coauthoring the paper. They conducted the survey in 2018 as part of the WholeTraveler Transportation Behavior Study and revisited its findings after the release of the Residential Energy Consumption study in 2022.

The interdisciplinary team noted that the relationship between electric cars and solar panels may still be complementary now that electric vehicles are significantly more prevalent on American roads. Twenty-five percent of EV owners had rooftop solar panels while only 8% of non-EV owners had installed solar panels at home.

Data from the 2018 study showed that more participants owned rooftop solar panels compared to electric cars (9.1% vs. 6.5%). Solar-panel technology was significantly cheaper than most electric vehicles at the time, and it had been around for much longer compared to EVs. The researchers also found that being aware of EV and solar technology and curious enough to ask about it were more likely to install solar panels.

Governments can hasten their efforts to meet emission targets by providing incentives to encourage the adoption of both electric cars and solar panels. Study authors say further research is necessary to understand the relationship between solar panels and electric cars. They published their findings in the journal “Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.”

The findings of this study linking EV ownership to a willingness to install solar power may give EV makers such as Kandi Technologies Group Inc. (NASDAQ: KNDI) plenty of food for thought regarding how they can tweak their messaging in order to get more customers to switch to EVs.

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