Charging an electric car from solar in South Africa: what actually works
The constraint is timing, not panels. Why a daytime charge is the only version of this that pays, and what to tell an installer sizing a system around a car.
Charging a car from your own solar is the cheapest electricity you will ever put in it, and it is also the easiest thing to get wrong. The difficulty is not generating the energy. It is that a car charges for hours at several kilowatts, and the sun is only available for some of those hours.
The timing problem, in one paragraph
A typical home charger draws around 7 kW single-phase, and the median connection in South Africa's public network is 22 kW. Either figure is a large fraction of, or larger than, what a normal domestic array produces at midday. So a car charging at night is running on the grid or on a battery, not on solar, no matter how many panels are on the roof. The version of this that works is charging while the array is producing, which means a car that is parked at home during the day, or a charger that can be scheduled.
What to tell an installer
The charger has to be part of the design brief, not added afterwards. An array and inverter sized for a household's existing consumption will not absorb a car without either exporting less, drawing from the grid, or discharging a battery that was meant for load-shedding. Say up front how much you drive, when the car is home, and whether you want it to charge only from surplus.
- Roughly how many kilometres a week, so the energy demand is real rather than assumed
- When the car is actually parked at home, which decides whether daytime charging is possible
- Whether the charger should modulate to track surplus, and whether the model you want supports it
- That the battery is for backup, if it is, so the car does not quietly drain it overnight
Sun hours are not the same everywhere
Production depends on where you are. The Northern Cape averages 9.6 peak sun hours a day and KwaZulu-Natal 7.4, a difference of nearly a third, and that shifts how much of a car's demand a given array can realistically cover. The provincial figures used across this site are on each province page.
The tax position, briefly
There is no residential incentive for any of this. The individual solar rebate closed and was not replaced, so a homeowner adding solar and a charger claims nothing. A business can still deduct qualifying renewable assets under Section 12B. The tax guide in the guides index covers what is open and what has closed.
Written and maintained by SunVerified from public sources, each linked below. We publish under the company name rather than invented bylines, and we correct guides when the underlying rules change. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
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