This will come as a shock to many, but rooftop solar and a backup home battery is significantly more effective climate action, compared to buying an EV. If you buy an EV, it comes wrapped in green virtue, but it’s not very effective at reducing CO2.
Rooftop solar and a home backup battery system is the exact opposite. It’s substantially more effective, and much cheaper.
This is not the kind of report the average motoring reporter would do. Carmakers hate it, but from where I stand, there’s an over-arching obligation to the facts. And those inconvenient facts start with:
There’s a growing list of morbidly obese EVs with mammoth batteries. For example, a Kia EV9 is a seven-seat electric EV that weighs an incredible 2.6 tonnes. Roughly 600kg of that is the battery. It goes without saying that this represents an incredible drain on resources, and huge up-front CO2 emissions.
It’s actually impossible seeing humanity saving the planet, 2.6 tonnes of energy-intensively manufactured consumer goods at a time.
Kia EV9: Morbidly obese, $130k and comes with the environmental concerns of a massive battery. Apart from that, great idea…
This highlights the comprehensive disregard the car industry has for taking effective climate action. Car companies worship one thing only: Money. It’s their God. They’ll do anything to get it. Climate action is a real priority for them - in the marketing department.
In reality, not so much.
The reality is that buying a diesel SUV plus a home solar system with a battery is both substantially cheaper and far more environmentally friendly than spending a huge amount of cash on an overweight EV.
I know: It’s counter-intuitive, and a carmaker would never admit it.
Rooftop solar is not as sexy as a new EV, perhaps, but it is certainly cheaper and more environmentally effective
A rooftop solar system with battery backup will substantially reduce your electricity bill, divorce your house from coal (the biggest emitter in the nation) and keep the lights on during a power failure.
And you can crank your air conditioning during the hottest summer days, without stressing about how much that’s ultimately going to cost you.
EVs certainly look green, but they are ridiculously expensive, and in the domain of egregious waste (of resources) and total climate-ineffectiveness it really doesn’t get more offensive than when a carmaker builds a giant two-and-a-half tonne EV with a battery larger than 90kWh.
If you buy an EV9, Polestar 3, or BMW i7 (or similar morbidly obese EV) it comes wrapped in green virtue, certainly, it might be delightful for you to delude yourself into thinking you’ve divorced yourself from oil.
But the fact is: The roads are made of oil. The food you eat today is wrapped in oil, and gets to the city thanks to oil. It’s fertilised with oil. Your house is painted with oil, and at least half of your clothing is made of oil.
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We could be here all day, detailing the ways your divorce from oil is not final once you own an EV...
Let’s say you retired a reasonably late-model diesel Sorento - or similar - to acquire your EV. The diesel SUV you retired (in the case of Sorento) emitted 159 grams of CO2 for every kilometre it drove, times 15,000 of those annually … is about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 every year.
One of the worst things about EVs - especially the huge ones - is the correspondingly huge amount of CO2 embodied in their manufacture.
The fact is: The 100kWh battery in an EV such as the EV9 has something in the order of 10 tonnes of CO2 embodied in its manufacture.
So, there’s the first four years of operation, literally, up in smoke - until you break even on CO2. And that’s only if you charge it up exclusively on green electricity. (Which is highly unlikely.)
A big EV might offer a range of about 500 kays, notionally, so if you do 15,000 kays a year, that’s the equivalent of about 30 full recharges - and let’s say you only manage two-thirds of those using green power. How long does that take to claw back, to break even on CO2?
Electricity in Australia is about 660 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt hour. That’s what you get when you take the total generation capacity (roughly 273,000 GWh) and divide it by the CO2 produced by electricity generation (roughly 155 million tonnes) plus roughly half the fugitive emissions from coal mines (because half of the coal is exported and the other half gets burned here - roughly 25 million tonnes).
Electricity in Australia is mostly coal-fired and therefopre carries with it the burden of roughly 660 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour generated nationwide.
You can crunch these numbers yourself - it’s about 660 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour of electricity, nationally.
So, if you only purchase filthy electricity for one-third of the vehicle’s operation, that’s 1000 kilowatt-hours annually. Or another 660kg of CO2 per year.
And if you run the numbers on that, it takes 5 years and 9 months to break even on CO2.
If you only use green electricity one-third of the time: roughly 9 years and 5 months. At about which time the battery is going to be near the end of its life, I expect.
(Especially if you do those things that inflict the death of a thousand cuts on a battery: Charge it to 100 per cent, discharge it fully, use it when it’s hot, use it when it’s cold, accelerate heavily, etc.)
Battery life is … well, there’s been insufficient time to determine an accurate picture, but fast charging, charging to 100 per cent, and operating in very hot or cold conditions will degrade the battery over time.
Nine years and five months: In other words - your virtuous, green driving has been roughly as green as driving a diesel Sorento the whole time, and now you’ll probably be scrapping the car because battery replacement is uneconomic.
If you don’t use any green electricity, and suck every recharge out of the grid, it will take 24 years to break even on CO2, but we all know the car will not last that long. How many 24-year-old cars have you seen on the road this week?
Obviously the grid will become a little greener over time, but surely you get the point here. Buying an EV might seem like the pinnacle of effective climate action, but in reality, it’s mostly for perception and virtue - the numbers don’t lie.
Most buyers of these premium EVs will not own them for nearly long enough to break even on CO2.
So, what happens if you just keep the diesel SUV, or go again with a new diesel. Well, in the case of a Kia Sorento diesel, versus a Kia EV9 electric SUV, you save about $60,000 if you buy the diesel instead. And it’s a very nice vehicle.
Let’s say you drop $10,000 of that saving on a quality solar array, and quality inverter, for your home. Call it 6.6kW. That’ll probably generate, on average, about 20kWh every day. Which is more electrical energy than you probably use at home.
Many people with rooftop solar export a substantial amount of electricity back to the grid
Average household use in Sydney is about 14kWh every day, FYI. That’s according to Finder.com.au, using data from the Australian Energy Regulator.
There’s a report called ‘Residential energy consumption benchmarks’ prepared by Frontier Economics - if you want to look it up and confirm what I’m reporting.
So, if I was going to do this today, I would pair my new solar system with a battery. I’m talking a stationary battery wired into your home system. (It’ll be significantly smaller than the battery in an EV, but more than enough to keep the house going. Moving two tonnes of steel from A to B requires a ridiculous amount of energy.)
This has several advantages: If the grid goes down and you have a power failure in your area, it kicks in in milliseconds and you won’t even notice. (Until you look up and down the street and everyone else’s house is black.)
Grid reliability is getting worse, which increases the attractiveness of having a functional backup for your home
If you install the battery and the solar/inverter at the same time, you can ‘apocalypse proof’ the setup - meaning, the array charges the battery when the grid is down, and you can continue to use electricity for an extended period.
The other reason you want the battery is: the solar array is most productive in the middle of the day, when the sun’s overhead, when a lot of people aren’t home.
So, the array cranks, it fills up the battery, and you can consume that energy in the evening and next morning, when the sun isn’t exactly talking to the array at full volume.
You’ll probably also find yourself also exporting quite a bit of electricity back to the grid.
Bottom line, in the domain of climate action: With the solar/battery installation you have effectively cured your addiction to coal.
Coal and emissions from coal mines in Australia are 200 million tonnes of CO2 out of roughly 465 million total tonnes of CO2 emitted every year. Coal is by far the biggest part of the problem.
So, with home solar and a battery, you are tackling that major addiction head-on. With a battery that’s only one-fifth of the size of a battery in a big EV.
(Obviously the smaller battery uses proportionally fewer resources, etc.)
Let’s say you buy a new diesel Sorento, instead of a fat-boy EV. You’ve got $60k left over (compared with buying that over-hyped EV9).
You spend $10k on a high-quality array and inverter, and $10k on a battery.
You’re $40k in front. Your vehicle is still emitting 2.4 tonnes of CO2 a year. But you no longer require grid electricity. This saves you 3.4 tonnes a year.
Of course, the battery might have something like two tonnes of CO2 embodied in it (as opposed to 10). So, in two years you break even, on CO2, and every year after that, you’re one tonne in front.
Versus five years-to-never in an oversized EV like the EV9, Polestar 3, i7, etc, with a body mass index of infinity. And you’re going to be a massive $40,000 in front. This really is a no-brainer, economically and environmentally
I’ve just partnered with Teho, an Australian solar and battery home power specialist. I’ve known the owners for years, and you can trust them. They do hundreds of installations just like this every month, and they handle the whole thing - the government rebate, the approvals - and they only use quality components from carefully selected suppliers with good local support.
Teho makes solar and batteries simple. In most cases, you’re up and running in a day. If you don’t know a kilowatt-hour from an inverter … no worries. These systems are integrated. They just work.
You’ll get a reliable rooftop array, inverter and battery setup that might make you money from day one. (It’ll certainly add value to your house.)
Your house will become ‘apocalypse proof’ - meaning not only do you get seamless blackout protection, the solar array also charges the battery every day, so all the essential stuff - lights, refrigerator, TV, etc. - will be up and running overnight, even if the outage is a long one.
We’ve all been told to expect more extreme weather events, grid instability, and consequential power failures - and this is an effective countermeasure against that, which you can easily implement.
Expect more extreme weather events, with corresponding periods of zero power from the grid while repairs are done.
Nobody likes paying that quarterly energy bill. This is a way to divorce yourself from that, as well. Of course, this is not the only divorce on offer here - divorcing yourself from those power bills also means a divorce from the coal that is typically burned making that electricity. (Coal is, of course, the biggest single source of CO2 emission in Australia.)
What this means is: You can take effective climate action, now, at a fraction of the cost of buying an electric car. And, unlike that electric car, a smart solar system with a backup battery will immediately start making you money as well as protect you and your family when the grid, inevitably, becomes unreliable.
Even if you haven’t got the cash up front, a system like this is available on an affordable payment plan. And the out-of-pocket amount might be minimal, given the fact you’ve given your electricity bill the flick. (It might even still be cashflow-positive.)
Imagine if cars were like that - we’d have to build a lot of additional car parks…
Large EVs are not economically rational or especially effective in terms of the environment.
A big EV starts depreciating (heavily) from the moment you drive it out of the dealership. A home solar system actually adds value to your home from day one, and might even be cashflow-positive from day one (depending on your particular situation).
Rooftop solar adds value to your home from day one - generally many times the cost of the system. An electric vehicle depreciates heavily from the day you drive it off the showroom floor.
This is why morbidly obese EVs are a climate action fraud. Carmakers are selling the wrong kind of EVs to make a difference, and governments are endorsing it - especially the Australian Government - because it looks good, and cars are so relatable.
Various Ministers of the Crown don’t want you, in the public, to focus on inconvenient truths, such as our nation being the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquefied natural gas, our filthy, expensive electricity, compared with civilised countries.
If you want to look green, buy an EV. If you want to take effective climate action, install rooftop solar and a home backup battery.
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