How has the EV battery performed?
Peter Aubourg presents the latest entry in his regular column 'Diary of an EV Driver'
The new stay-at-home house battery has been getting all the attention over the past month. So I thought that it was about time to see how the 51kWh MG car battery has been performing – before the effect of the house battery kicks in.
I have got good data over the last two years. When the car is plugged in, my Evnex charger is set up to divert any excess solar that would have gone back to the grid, directly into the car battery. This means that most of the time the “fuel” for our car is free. However, the system is not perfect.
Sometimes we drive the car away from the house when it’s sunny and sometimes it is just cloudy. So we occasionally need to top-up the car battery straight from the grid from our fixed-rate plan.
Our average yearly travel was 11,400km and the cost of top-up grid power was $190 for the year.
I did some calculations to compare this with the diesel Qashqai that we used to own. For the same number of km/year, it would be like paying 24c/litre for diesel. Not bad! To reduce the cost even further, I am now changing over to an electricity supplier that has an EV plan with a cost per kWh that is about a third of our current rate.
Apart from the ridiculously low running costs, the car is quiet to drive, has no gears and has fantastic acceleration. My wife and I still compete as to who gets to drive. It’s still like having a new car, even after owning it for more than two years.
Back to the new stay-at-home house battery that we’ve had for just over a month. It is brilliant at sucking up all the excess solar power.
So far, the panels/battery combo has kept the house in power, without importing any power from the grid. We purposely bought a battery with a multi-day storage and have been pleased with the results from the 24kWh battery. The most challenging time is when there are a couple of rainy days in a row. Last month it happened twice and the battery came out with flying colours.
Note: Peter's article was written in February and first published in print on March 1. Fuel prices have changed a bit since then, as the sign below in Port Kembla yesterday shows.
