EV costs are predictable; that cannot be said about gas powered vehicles

A typical home in western Washington uses about 10,800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year. If you add in an electric car, that will increase to about 14,400 kWh.

Solar panels in western Washington produce about 1,100 kWh per year, per installed kilowatt (kW) of capacity. To fully power a house and a car, you’d need to install about 13 kW of solar generation capacity.

Here in Washington, net metering utility rate tariffs allow you to feed excess power to the grid and be paid for it, so, for that typical home, installing 13 kW of solar power would reduce your combined electric and single-car fuel bill to about zero (you still have to pay a minor grid connection charge, usually less than $10/month). Besides the connection fee, you still save about $1300 a year on the electricity your home required before buying the electric car.

The cost of an electric car for commuting 12,000 miles/year varies substantially based on the model. Say, however, that your plan is to use it as a commuter/second car, and that you’re not particularly concerned about longer trips. If the new EV replaces an older commuter car that gets 20 miles per gallon and the gas price is about $4.50/gallon, you’d save $2,700/year on fuel, and probably about $1,000/year on maintenance.

Your total savings: $5,000/year.

A new base-model electric vehicle – one with enough range for comfortable commuting, but not for long-range driving – can cost around $30,000. A 240 volt home charger, which most EV drivers prefer, would add about $2,500. The cost of a 13 kW solar installation, e.g., via the Solarize program the Skagit Valley Clean Energy Cooperative sponsored this year, would be about $36,400 before tax credits, or $25,500 after tax credits. Your total up-front cost would be about $58,000.

Driving a car 12,000 miles a year for 12 years puts 144,000 miles on it. With modern cars, that’s realistic.

After 12 years, you’ll have saved $60,000, or $2,000 more than you invested in these devices. At that point, you’d need to buy a new car – but you probably would anyway, since 144,000 miles is a good lifetime for a gasoline engine car, too.

Over the next 12 years, your savings on car maintenance would be a little less because maintenance wouldn’t cost as much on a new internal combustion engine car as it did on the used one you originally replaced. So, you’d only save, on average, about $4,500/year for the next 12 years, or another $54,000.

Total savings over 24 years: $56,000 – and your car fuel budget will be predictable, not volatile. If the price of oil goes up, your total savings will be even greater.

The price of oil is more likely to go up, on average, over 24 years, than it is to go down. It has gone up, on average, over the last two 24 year periods, because easily accessible, shallow, low-sulfur oil has long since been discovered. New oil fields are likely to be in inaccessible (e.g., deep ocean, remote Siberia) locations with inherently high costs of discovery, development, production and delivery. Even if all regulations were removed, and drilling was completely unrestricted, oil prices would still have to be high to justify and repay investment in pursuing new oil.