What loomed as a regulatory headache for Sunnyvale Golf Course in California's San Francisco Bay area now serves as a boon to the bottom line thanks to soaring oil prices. This fiscal year, the course will likely save in the order of $25,000 running electric golf cars instead of gasoline-powered vehicles. Moreover, golfers are happier with the quieter, cleaner transport, and car rentals are nudging upwards.

“We’re absolutely providing a better product for our golfers,” says Mark Petersen, Sunnyvale’s golf services supervisor. “Our customers are tickled pink with the electric cars.”

Reduced expenses, increased sales and improved customer satisfaction make for an attractive package in any business. But as desirable as those outcomes are, they weren’t the impetus behind the switch to electric cars. Instead, they are byproducts of an environmental goal mandated by the California Clean Air Act. The law specified that, as of June 2000, gasoline-powered golf cars could no longer be purchased or leased in specific regions of the state.

Sunnyvale leased a new fleet of gas cars in the early weeks of that year but knew they were living on borrowed time. So before the year was out, Gary Carls, Sunnyvale’s new golf operations supervisor, began mapping a route to Clean Air Act compliance. Carls, a certified golf course superintendent who has since served on the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America board of directors, knew there were only two choices: do away with carts altogether or go electric.

“Many of our core golfers are older and just wouldn’t be able to get around 18 holes without cars,” he says. Just as significantly, golf car revenue totaled nearly $350,000 a year at the time. Cutting that cash flow would put a hole in resources available to the city’s Community Recreation Fund for youth and senior services. What choice there was existed only in theory. Sunnyvale needed electric cars. The issue was where to put them.

Until that point, Sunnyvale chained its fleet together under the stars each night and washed vehicles down once a week. To Carls, it “seemed obvious” that the course needed a building in which to store and charge future fleets. But when his preliminary report to that effect was presented to the city’s Project Review Committee, several committee members balked, arguing that the city was already charging several electric vehicles in the open air. Why should golf cars be any different?

To settle that question, the split committee authorized a $10,000 feasibility study. The two largest car manufacturers strongly recommended any recharging facility be housed for the benefit of the cars, the charging apparatus and the staff doing the work. Exposure to the elements would prematurely age the vehicles and the associated equipment. More importantly, the manufacturers reported that rain, and even dew, could generate moisture levels on uncovered carts that would “expose staff to unnecessary hazards.”

In the end, the City of Sunnyvale invested $430,000 on a 5,500-square-foot facility to house 60 electric golf cars that arrived in August 2004. If that sounds like a lot of money, there’s a reason. While Carls found comparable buildings at other area courses had been built for less than $250,000, Sunnyvale’s bill was inflated by the city bringing in its Projects Administration Division to oversee construction, adding a layer that didn’t exist at other courses.

Carls also included a recycling wash system at the facility. But that investment began paying for itself immediately with a drop in consumption of costly city water, even though the cars were now being rinsed daily rather than weekly. Petersen, whose staff runs the car operation, says quantifying wash pad savings is difficult because water use across the property is not segmented. “But it has to be worth something,” he notes.

What can be measured more readily are operating expenses and maintenance costs. Today, with gas around $3.40 a gallon, Sunnyvale would have spent $469 per car over 12 months compared with $204 for electricity, even with lighting at the storage facility thrown in. That’s a $265 savings per car, or $15,900 overall.

Moreover, maintenance and repairs not covered by warranty used to cost approximately $200 annually for the gas cars compared with $70 for the electric vehicles. At $130 less per unit, that’s another $7,800 in yearly savings. Sunnyvale’s preference for three-year leases turns over cars before batteries that can cost up to $600 per vehicle need to be replaced.

Petersen says other elements further contribute to the total savings. “Our dispatch rate with electric cars is significantly higher,” he says. “You just don’t have anywhere near the number of small things that can go wrong as you do with a gas car that can put it out of service.”

One aspect Sunnyvale officials didn’t change was the amount of staff assigned to the golf car operation; however, their tasks were altered. Now, the cart staff has more time to spend on cleaning and car presentation, a factor Petersen suspects is behind a 3- to 4-percent increase in rentals since the switch from gas, even while rounds have remained relatively static. “That and the fact the cars make less noise and they have a roof,” Petersen adds. “The old cars didn’t.”

For his part, Carls is now dabbling with another enviro-friendly step at Sunnyvale by using 5 percent biofuel for the course’s heavy equipment. Yet even this practice is linked to the switch from gas to electric cars, as Carls stores his biofuel in one of two 1,000-gallon tanks that used to hold gasoline.

Regardless of the driving force behind the decision, this effort—coupled with the golf car conversion—represents recycling on a grand scale. In this era of environmental consciousness, these are practices that should make sense for most operators.