EV: how much is 6kWh?

Our first Leaf was the 2013 model year. That was the year Nissan  boosted cold weather driving range by 20+ miles with the switch to heat pumps, for an estimated 85 total miles. While I was able to get 82 miles from one charge (summer hypermiling), in practice the range was quite a bit less. The worst case, mid-winter driving to and from work in the cold and dark, the range was closer to 50 miles. For Jen’s 32 mile round-trip commute, that mean charging the car every night.

On long trips, recharging an EV has the same level of friction as adding gas to an ICE. In the case of commuting, EV refueling is considerably more convenient:

EV

ICE
drive home drive to station
wait in line for pump
park near EV plug pull up to pump
negotiate payment
plug in plug in
wait for tank to fill
unplug (later) unplug
drive away

When the 2016 model year Leaf was released, the battery capacity increased from 24kWh to 30kWh, boosting the EPA rated range from 84 to 107 miles. That extra 23 miles was just enough to get us out to the ski resorts in the winter. It also made quite a difference in how often our Silver Leaf needed to recharge:

good neighbors

Today I heard my neighbors car alarm go off so I headed to a window. Then their other car’s alarm started going off too. Looking out the window, I could see both neighbors and their daughter, pushing buttons on their remotes to get the alarms to shut up.

Seizing the moment, I grabbed a broom and raced out the door towards them. While brandishing my broom high I screamed at them, “get away from my neighbors car.” Rhonda, their daughter, who had set off the first alarm was rendered utterly helpless. Apparently it’s much harder to dodge a broom waving maniac while busting a gut laughing. Who knew?

Smitty, upon hearing the first alarm, thought it was his car so he grabbed his keys and hit the alarm button to turn it off, which is why there was now two car alarms blaring. Rhonda had turned off the first alarm, but then Smitty’s started so she hit the alarm button again, turning it back on. I arrived in time to inject more confusion and transform it into a true comedy of errors.

Get them jollies while you can!

snowflake server

I’m in the middle of rebuilding my server. For years I provisioned one-off virtual machines for clients that needed custom solutions. Dedicated IPs for TLS (for shopping carts), custom coded extensions that turned a photo app into a shopping cart, email servers, etc. I’ve been maintaining those VMs for years while the cost of technical debt has been growing.

The base OS in the VMs is years old. As software gets upgraded, the state of the VMs slowly drift and the result is a snowflake server. Upgrades frequently break something. I monitor most services and usually get them fixed before anyone notices. Still. Even on conservative OSes like Debian and FreeBSD, stuff regularly breaks and manual intervention is required. And those manual fixes here and there contribute to the drift.

So I’m rearchitecting everything for composability and simplicity. HAproxy handles all the HTTP redirection and HTTPS termination. The certificate management is now completely automated with Let’s Encrypt and acme.sh. HAproxy routes the requests to the backend web servers. No longer do apache, lighttpd, and nginx handle SSL/TLS or URL manipulation. The web server configs are simpler and require fewer customizations.

Financial Literacy

A Freakonomics Radio podcast I just listened to, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Money (But Were Afraid to Ask), stated that studies have shown that in the USA and in nearly every other country studied, the percentage of people who are financially literate is under 30%. That’s the bad news.

The good news was Harold Pollack’s “all the financial advice you’ll ever need fits on an index card” conversation. I took notes:

  1. save 20% of your income
  2. pay off your credit card bill in full every month
  3. max out 401k & other tax advantaged accounts
    1. it reduces your tax burden today
    2. matching employer contributions are free money
  4. never buy or sell individual stocks
  5. buy inexpensive and well diversified index and ETF funds
  6. make your financial advisor adhere to the fiduciary standard
  7. buy a home when you’re financially ready
    1. homes are something we use and consume
    2. when are we ready?
      1. have 20% in hand
      2. fixed rate 15/30 year mortgage
      3. still have reserves for home maintenance
  8. insurance: be protected against losses > your reserves
    1. get the largest deductible
  9. do what you can to support the social safety net
    1. bad stuff happens
    2. lots of people need help

Solar ROI update

I now have a full year of electric production and consumption measured. I also have the SCL rate updates for 2017 and 2018 so I have updated my solar ROI estimates. The significant change is that the Net Metering benefit has substantially increased due to:

  1. SCL electric rates are higher in Shoreline than Seattle.
  2. The 2017 and 2018 rate increases are 5.6% (estimated at 4%)
  3. An added RSA surcharge of 1.5%
  4. The coldest winter in 32 years
  5. More electricity use than I predicted.
    • I was still insulating deep into the heating season.
    • I guesstimated the kWh it would require to heat a 1955 house with heat pumps.
    • I installed a fast (level 2) charger for our Leaf. We were able to use it more, offsetting gasoline with electricity.
  6. The increased usage is all at the higher 0.14¢ price tier.

Reasons 1-4 weren’t known during my initial estimates. Reasons 5 and 6 were planned but their scale was unknown. I knew I’d be removing all natural gas appliances (furnace, water heater, fireplace) but I hadn’t yet decided whether to install tankless electric or a heat pump water heater. I hadn’t chosen the heat pumps for house heat yet so I didn’t know their HSPF. I also didn’t know how much more we’d be able to use the Leaf.

The net result is that I now estimate a 100% return on the solar array in the 6th year instead of the 8th year.

Notes

  • I did not include the cost of the heat pumps or the heat pump water heater. Those were efficiency upgrades that I’d have done anyway. If I were keeping natural gas, I’d have replaced the old 80% furnace with a 97% modulating furnace and the “well past its expected lifespan” gas water heater with a gas tankless. In both cases the costs are comparable and just like replacing the fridge, the efficiency increases have their own ROI schedule.

Solar 11-month update

On a typical “it rained every single day in April” month, we still managed to skate across the finish line at nearly at Net Zero:

April 2017 household energy
April 2017 household + auto energy budget

Last year I removed all the natural gas appliances and converted everything to electric heat pumps. I sized the 10kW array aiming for Net Zero during the calendar year. That would mean producing enough surplus during the summer to carry us through the winter. It looks like we’re going to miss this year:

2016-2017 household energy budget

Even though we’ll be banking surpluses in May, it won’t close that 7MWh deficit. Our household usage includes over 3MWh of car charging and this last winter was Seattle’s coldest in 32 years. The heat pumps were working overtime to keep the house warm.

April solar update

The coldest Puget Sound winter in decades is receding and with it the heat pumps heavy period of energy use. April showers are upon us, the sun is rising higher each passing week and solar output is crawling out of the winter basement. In the past week, the solar panels produced 75% of our household energy budget. It looks like we’ll be into “solar surplus” territory by the end of April.

Costco Citi Card

While balancing the books I found it disappointing that AmEx dumped access to their site the instant the Costco transferred our accounts to Visa. Companies with better service tend to provide access for a period after cancellation to download statements and the like.

I was at first a little perplexed as the Citi statements begin in July and the last AmEx statement I was able to download was for May. Then I read the fine print in Citi’s site. We just have to create a request and wait 24-48 hours for the PDF statement to appear. Okay, request sent.

Better still, I was able to download all the account transactions and Citi has export formats for any accounting software. Some banks (cough: USAA) can’t seem to understand that exporting account data in OFX/QIF format for accounting software is a useful feature. Anyway, I picked the “since last export” and got transactions starting in mid-2015, so it appears a goodly portion of our account history transferred. Thank you Citi.

Who’s Afraid of the TPP?

Who’s Afraid of the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Very roughly speaking, DeLong’s argument is this: everyone agrees that Germany is the poster child for an advanced economy with a great manufacturing policy. And yet, their manufacturing employment has steadily declined for the past half century too, just like ours. So if this has happened to Germany, there’s not much of a case for suggesting that the US has done anything especially wrong over the past 50 years. We’ve simply evolved from a (relatively) poor manufacturing nation into a (relatively) rich services and technology nation. This has nothing much to do with trade policy, either. It’s just what rich countries do. What’s more, it’s a decidedly good thing overall, even if it does affect a smallish number of people badly.

This is not terribly different than agricultural employment. At the turn of the 20th century about half of US workers were employed in agriculture. A hundred years later as we skated past Y2K it is about 2%.