I’m Sure Glad I Bought an EV and Solar Panels

In 2024, my wife and I had a baby, and we needed a new car. After much research, I went with a Hyundai Kona EV. It was relatively cheap, it has decent range, and enough space for a small family.

The stereotype of EVs is that they are for environmentally conscious liberals to do their part to fight climate change. And that’s true to some degree, if somewhat outdated when applied to, say, the gargantuan Silverado EV truck.

It’s also slowly becoming well known that EVs are much cheaper to operate than gas cars, at least if you can charge at home. Fully charging my Kona from dead flat off grid power where I live costs roughly ten bucks. About the only regular maintenance it requires is a yearly tire rotation—no oil changes, no timing belt adjustments, no valve clearance checks, etc. Insurance costs are not that different from a gas-powered car.

More from Ryan Cooper: Trump’s Senseless Waste in Iran

But there is an underappreciated aspect to this benefit: fuel price security.

You might buy a gas-powered Ford F-150 (the most popular passenger vehicle in America), figuring that you can afford 21 miles per gallon when gas is under $3. Then the senile gangster president starts a war with Iran because of … something, leading Iran to block the Strait of Hormuz, which carries 20 percent of the world’s oil production. Storage facilities in Iraq and Saudi Arabia quickly fill up, leading to production pauses.

That causes the price of oil to shoot up from $65 a barrel to $90 in a week. Gasoline futures and gas prices quickly follow, at a lag. According to AAA, the national average price of regular gas hit $3.32 on Friday, up 35 cents in a week, with more to come.

The longer the strait remains closed—and there is no sign whatsoever that the war is going to stop, as Trump is now demanding UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, whatever that might mean—the longer and more difficult it will be to restart oil production. Oil could easily shoot past $150 a barrel. We might just surpass the all-time American record of $5 per gallon reached back in 2022.

Now, electricity prices can and do increase over time. But such increases are virtually always much slower and more predictable than the wild gyrations in oil prices, given how much of the power bill reflects large fixed investments made decades ago. And even if your bill is shooting up because of nearby data centers, there’s a solution for that too.

An EV’s price security is strengthened when you add solar power to the equation. Last year, I took my own advice and set up a Joad family–style solar system by propping six panels against my fence and using them to charge up two battery power stations, which I then lug across my basement to juice up the car a little bit at night. The panels are sited poorly and shaded much of the day; nevertheless, even during winter, if it is sunny, I can produce just about enough power to account for the Kona’s modest daily needs. Very soon, I’ll have to find other ways to use up the power.

I had to shell out a few thousand dollars for that equipment, but after that it is all gravy. Global commodity markets can’t affect that in the slightest. (And just speaking personally, I find dumping each load of hand-harvested electrons into my car deeply satisfying. It’s my own personal middle finger to all the right-wing oil barons and murderous petrostate dictators.)

Solar increases the climate benefit of an EV too, as you are charging it with 100 percent renewable power, rather than including some coming from coal and/or gas, which is the case in most of the country (though it’s still much better than an internal combustion car).

Alas, on Thursday afternoon my poor Kona suffered a hit-and-run from some reckless driver, and will have to be in the shop for a while. The only available loaner car, naturally, is some hulking SUV.

But even that will illustrate the increasing benefits for going electric. Trump may have repealed Joe Biden’s EV subsidies, but in a way he is replacing them by making gas-powered driving much more expensive. The sooner you go EV, the sooner you can be free from the oil price gyrations caused by yet another deranged Republican war in the Middle East.

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