Electric vehicles are all the rage recently and quite often you’ll overhear people having conversations about their new hybrid car, or how their place of work has recently installed EV chargers throughout the company car park as a way of encouraging workers to use electric cars. It is the future, moving away from fossil fuel power for our vehicles, and if you have recently installed solar panels at your home or place of work, you might be wondering how much solar power is required for vehicle and plant charging. We’ll help break it down for you in this article.
Using solar power to charge electric cars
If you have solar panels installed at your place of work or your home, you might be wondering how much energy you need to charge an electric car in full. This is advantageous to know, especially if you are looking to entice your workforce to start using electric cars instead of petrol cars. A standard solar panel installation is likely to come with around 8-12 solar panels. This should be enough to partially charge an electric car that allows you to drive short distances, to and from work for instance.
It depends on a few things, such as the type of EV you have, how many miles you drive each day, and how much sunlight there is at the location of the solar panels. In most cases, it makes sense to charge our electric vehicles overnight, and therefore it is necessary to have access to solar battery storage that can store up the solar powered electricity that is created during the day and then use that to charge your vehicle at night.
Home charging for company cars
With company cars there is a chance to claim back tax relief on your fuel consumption, but how does this work if you have an electric vehicle that you charge at home overnight? EV charge points are becoming mandatory for all newbuilds in the country and there will be grants available to retrofit some properties. The Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme has come into force in April 2022 and is open to any person who has been assigned an EV or plug-in hybrid company car for six months or longer. This will help cover up to 75{d2862e6e2d69dd67fc7e121421cd8c1e934bb4a7696309954b9c432b55e5f955} of the cost of a charging point.
Claiming back your costs on electric cars that you charge at home might be a little difficult but not impossible. HMRC allows drivers to claim 5p per mile for business trips made in electric vehicles, which should be enough to cover the cost of charging your vehicle at home overnight.
There are a few different options for you if you are looking into charging your electric plant and vehicles in the workplace or at home. Installing EV charging points is a great motivation for employees and has its tax benefits for businesses, as we have seen in this article. Connecting these electric vehicle and plant charging points directly to a solar panel installation on site is a fantastic idea, as is hiring a solar powered generator for those sites where there is not a solar panel system in place. Finding generator hire solutions in these circumstances gives you the best of all worlds, utilising the know-how and experience of effective solar powered generators where applicable, and solar power direct to help charge your electric vehicles.
