| ▲ | gerdesj 3 days ago | |||||||
That might be where the EV wheels fall off! CA is notionally EV friendly but it is also a US state and it is rather large, so range is king. CA is mostly very warm so that helps with range. Gas (petrol) is relatively cheap and 'leccy is quite expensive. The UK extracts rather a lot of tax (fuel duty) on top of the actual market cost of petrol. That's why our petrol/gas cost is pretty extreme. I have no idea how we ended up in this pickle (I have a few ideas), given that we have the North Sea oil deposits nearby. I think we failed to work that as well as Norway did. Bloody amateurs! You probably have rather more land than me and could consider solar cells. My house conveniently faces south but its a two storey bungalow with three dormers, which means I can't put PV cells on the roof, facing the sun. My garden is also rather unsuitable for PV, being about 1/2 acre with mostly a 30% slope (its quite odd). The world's climate woes are not yours or my responsibility. PV and EV may help or not. I can manage EV but not PV. You may find that the capital cost of deploying PV in CA might pay off quite quickly. My IT company has a customer ... . They have a PV (solar panel) deployment on top of a building. This is in Dorset (UK). There are something like 20-30 panels on the roof. I've seen the monitor on a fairly bad day - 2 KW and in bright sunshine something like 8 KW. I'm pretty sure that CA could do rather better. | ||||||||
| ▲ | aidenn0 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
My total lot is under 5000 square feet (about 450 square meters), much of which is covered with house. I do have rooftop solar. A few other notes: - On average, both petrol and electricity is more expensive in CA than most of the US - Petrol is expensive throughout the state, but electricity can be cheap if you live in a city with public utilities (The city of Sacramento has a public utility and rates are about half what they are on a private utility where I am). - Peak rates are about $0.55/kWh (41p), but off-peak times are a generous 19 hours a day 21:00-16:00) in the summer, mainly because there is so much solar, so we have the "duck curve[1]" here. - I live near the coast, so get fog in May and June, but July and August I generate quite a bit (over 10kWh per day this July). | ||||||||
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