If purchasing an electric vehicle nets you a green badge of honor, then buying an electric car and an array of photovoltaic cells to charge it surely earns you a Nobel Prize. Well, eco-nerds, clear out a space in your trophy cases, because Ford has teamed up with solar-panel-integration specialists SunPower to offer Ford Focus Electric buyers a tailored solar-power generation system for home installation.
The 2.5-kW solar-panel array won’t deliver electricity directly to the Focus’s charger. Instead, the panels were designed to offset the power used to juice the Focus by feeding an equivalent amount of electricity to the home over time. It should be noted that Ford and SunPower’s electric-performance stats assume the photovoltaic cells produce an average of 3000 kWh of electricity annually, and that the Focus Electric owner averages 1000 miles of driving per month in the car. Drive 1001 miles in a month in your new Focus Electric and you won’t fully offset the power used to charge your car, causing catastrophic ecological havoc. Or something.
So what does this greengasm cost? In addition to the as-yet-undisclosed cost of the Focus Electric, Ford promises the SunPower system will command less than $10,000 after federal tax credits. Financing options for the solar array will be available, and SunPower will even throw in an iPhone app that allows homeowners to remotely monitor the system.
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