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Getting Something For Nothing
I just contracted to buy all the gasoline I want at 24 cents a gallon. No, I have not struck oil in my backyard, or come into an inheritance from a long lost Kuwaiti relative. That is the de facto price that PG&E is billing me for a full charge on the all-electric Nissan Leaf that will be delivered to me in December.
That works out to $1.20 to recharge a vehicle that will transport me 100 miles, at the price of five cents a kilowatt hour. That compares to the $15 I currently pay to top up the tank on my conventional gasoline engine driven car. This is less than half the 11.8 cent/hour I pay to run the rest of my appliances, and a tiny fraction of the 40 cent/hour peak rate I pay to run the air conditioner in the summer.
PG&E has exactly one engineer to talk to its 10 million customers about this ground breaking new technology, and after much effort, I managed to get him on the phone. I asked who was paying the subsidy? Were those profligate bastards in Washington involved? He answered that there was no subsidy, that power sold at night was cheap because there was no other market.
So I inquired as to who was paying for all of the equipment upgrades, like the new transformers and power lines that were needed? Do I sense the heavy hand of Sacramento? He replied that there was no capital cost because the same infrastructure that delivered power to me during the day would be used to power my car at night. Only a couple of bucks would be spent on the installation of a new “time of use meter”.
Of course, they have subsidized the hell out of the Leaf itself. The car that is costing me $22,000 here in California sells for $32,000 in Japan. That beats the hell of the Chevy Volt, which is expected to hit the market at $42,000 and only goes 40 miles on a single charge. I know we’re supposed to be cutting the deficit by eliminating handouts like this. But you’ll only take my subsidies by prying my cold dead hands away from them. Take someone else’s subsidies, not mine! It is the American thing to do these days.
Shortly after our conversation, a technician came out to visit me. The good news is that the installation of a new 50 amp circuit breaker for the EVSE charging dock (see below) was going to cost only $750, half of which is tax deductable. This is a simple inverter which converts the AC off the grid into DC to charge the battery. Since the charging dock will have a 25 foot cable with a SAE standard J1772 universal plug, it can be used to top up a Leaf, a Volt, or any other electrical vehicle that comes down the pike. It is also over engineered to handle triple the Leaf’s load demand to accommodate future upgrades with heftier battery packs.
It was quite entertaining chatting with the tech, drawing as much as I could from an ancient electrical engineering course I took in college. Some of his customers were “extreme” environmental early adopters, with bidirectional “time of use” electric meters that allow their solar panels and wind mills to make them net suppliers of power to the grid. My new PG&E (PGE) smart meter actually scored poorly on its SAT test, as it was still awaiting some future upgrade to become fully functional. He then pinned a life sized poster of my new charging station to the wall in the appropriate location, presumably so we and our gardening tools can learn to live with it.
As he left, he thanked me for taking the technology a long awaited leap forward. Wow! When was the last time someone thanked me for my business?
He did mention that one unanticipated problem had arisen. My ears perked up. Many wealthy Tesla Roadster owners in Los Altos Hills were impressing so many girlfriends with rides that they were requiring multiple daytime recharges, even though they promised to recharge only at night. Not only did this send their electricity bills through the roof, it was causing problems with the grid as well. I guess its all part of the teething process, a cost of making the great leap forward to the next generation. Who knew that Match.com would be involved?
I never thought I’d get something for nothing, but it looks like this time I will. That is, as long as the damn car works, and my kids don’t run the battery down playing rap music all night. For a glimpse at the future and further insights into this amazing technology, please visit Nissan’s Leaf website at https://www.drivenissanleaf.com/ .
To see the data, charts, and graphs that support this research piece, as well as more iconoclastic and out-of-consensus analysis, please visit me at www.madhedgefundtrader.com . There, you will find the conventional wisdom mercilessly flailed and tortured daily, and my last two years of research reports available for free. You can also listen to me on Hedge Fund Radio by clicking on “This Week on Hedge Fund Radio” in the upper right corner of my home page.
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The Nissan Leaf isn't perfect, but it's the only reasonably-priced electric vehicle that can actually run on highways. Compare it to the $20K golf carts sold by other EV companies and the Leaf is obviously a better deal. I reserved one to use as an errand vehicle for my business, and when Nissan's EV delivery van comes out we will take a look at that as well. The Leaf was supposed be available for actual orders on June 30th, but that date is long passed and rumor has it the Japanese government is severely limiting the number that will be available to U.S. customers.
to build a car you need MORE gasoline/oil than the car will use in its whole lifetime.
If you want to buy an environmentally good car, please think about how much oil was already used up, just to build the car...
so, from an environmental standpoint it is much better to drive your old car as long as possible than to buy a new gas-saving car.
Think about it, how many cars have you allready bought in your lifetime? Are you at your 3,4, 7th car? Just sum it all up and you have a "oil footprint" that is just crazily wasteful.
You make several good points, as your pic illustrates. Even the beloved electric vehicle uses an incredible amount of oil just to be produced. Cash for clunkers was anything other than green, when you consider how much oil was wasted by clunking viable vehicles. We should be committing that capital to research, not projects that simply "do anything". I live in an area that is laying off teachers and other public necessities, raising taxes, and in the next breath installing solar panels for $1.3 million that produce $8,000 of electricity a year. This is empirical data. Do the math on that. It is simply wasting green money to feel good. I would rather spend the money on research that may pencil than waste it on projects that don't pencil.
Goinfowr:
I liked your article. My question: Assume this is as good as you state. It will take no more than a year or two before the benefit of cheap AC at night will disappear and the night capacity will be at limit from the recharges. What is the math on that? Is the delta so high that this argument is moot? It just seems like this may be one of those situations that the solution becomes the problem.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of electric vehicles. They make sense once battery technology is ricky-tic. My issue with most alt energy is that we tend to oversell it and over-subsidize it, one way or another. This payment eats our seedcorn of research money.
I hope the electric vehicles take off. I'd love to get the price of diesel down so my big pick-em-up truck fuel cost gets cheap!
I hope you enjoy your new car, MHFT. Please keep us updated on its performance, maintenance costs, etc.
Electric, pure or hybrid, isn't up to the demands I have for transport right now. But I hope it works for you.
So what happens when the monopoly electric company has everyone in electric cars? I know jack the rates! SCAM! I want carbon burning wheels!
I dont want to sound racist but that is the typical mindset that is ramming the world.
A small communauty of frontrunners have means to exploit the blind spots of a system and ssshweeee, you can make a generality out of it. The synonym to unproficiency in terms of analyzing.
Fact is that the oil market is mature when it comes to supporting cars consumption.
The electrical market is far from being as price is nearly not influenced by electrical cars consumption.
This kind of mindset is annoying. Recycling the stereotype the guy with the electrical cars gets the chick.
Compare the guy with the big combustion engine car gets the chick. The guy with the combustion engine gets the chick. The guy with the horse gets the chick.
In many places in the world, both present and past times, guys who do/did not participate to military duty (did) get no chick.
Want males to participate to a ponzi scheme? Tell them they will get the females.
huh, where can one get a residential-dwelling-capacity battery = charge it at night- genius!
that power sold at night was cheap because there was no other market.
Yes, but now you're creating a market... Green energy will soon be monopolised by the crooks too.
GOLD updated chart showing parabolic move.
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
When they make a Mercedes Benz do this trick I'll buy one. I'm not giving up my MBZ even if gas is $10 a gallon.
A few Tesla Roadsters in Palo Alto causing problems on the grid due to charging in the daytime! LOL, this electric car thing is going to work real well!
A few Tesla Roadsters in Palo Alto causing problems on the grid due to charging in the daytime! LOL, this electric car thing is going to work real well!
Really, I hadn't heard that... hunh. Got any links?
It was in the third to last paragraph of the author's original post.
Right, forgot, thanks.
Backchecking...li'l help madhedge? Or is that purely anecdotal?
Fat Ass doesn't seem to agree either.
I wouldn't waste a second "researching" this question. The claim could not be more patently absurd. Only about a hundred Tesla's are on the road, and they aren't all plugged in at the same time or the same place . . . not that common sense wouldn't inform you of the obvious: A hundred Tesla's couldn't possibly cause any problems with the grid even if they were.
Bob, in Ca, on hot days, the additional AC demands brings down sections of the grid everytime. Advisory alerts are issued and we turn off lights in our offices, no kidding. The current demands of recharging an electric vehicle are completely nontrivial, so it is not that absurb. Also keep in mind that our electrical infrastructure is crumbling.
Our NG distribution infrastructure is also in bad shape (san bruno fire)
Hmm, do I detect a pattern here???
Yeah, I understand that the grid is not perfectly or even adequately stable, Hulk, but that is relevant when high-rise office buildings filling entire city blocks fire up the AC or when thousands of home AC's switch on. But 100 Tesla's? C'mon, that's ridiculous, man!
I looked up the charging characteristics of the roadster, and the quickcharge of 3 hours draws 18 kw of power. (220v x 80 amps) , so a handful of these things could bring down an already stressed grid (and I bet these guys had these things on quickcharge)
here is the page for charging data
http://green.autoblog.com/2008/07/06/charging-a-tesla-roadster-from-household-outlet-could-take-30-ho/
Also the page for the leaf, which is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
Plans are in place in Ca to "same phase" both legs of the 220 volt feed so as to turn off all 220 volt appliances, during hot weather to avoid blackouts, thats how critical things are there...
Hulk, that draw may blow out the dog leg of the sub-sub-sub-sub grid of your cul de sac, but really.
If you can meaningfully throw numbers the way you have, you know this is ridiculous. Know when to fold em, man.
The only thing folding Bob will be the grid if even 1 percent of our cars were electric.
Thats my point...
edit: in previous posts I have pointed out that to replace gasoline vehicles in ca alone, we would need to build about 75, 1 GW Nucs...
1% penetration by PEV's will take at least 10 years . . . after new generation batteries are developed. To your larger point, though, we definitely need to buck up the grid. There are entirely new approaches to wind power, of all things, coming down the pike (wish I had saved some links on that, but I'm coming up empty.) Who knows what's ahead for nuclear as well.
Holy shit. 80 AMPS?!? The average house only has 100 amps from the power-company.
Wonder if city-folks will be hacking into street-lamp connections with an acetylene torch if these things take off.
My old Mains in the wall was supposiedly rated for 100 amps. It completely failed the load test at 84 amps over one hour and further research discovered that this box was actually rated for 60 frigging amps continous load 30+ years ago. It actually melted thermally and moved away from several switches killing the house when hot and when everything is off, the box cools back to making contact with the durn switches and worked again.
Now we have a monster 200 amp BOX feeding a MAX of 72 amps to the house with absolutely everything energry star equippted. The light bulb in each room only pulls 13 watt and .330 milliamps.
Everything else is overengineered and we can take on at least anohter 75 to 90 more amps in total capacity to the box before maxing it out at the required limit of 80% full rated amp load.
If you stuck a 50 amp switch to feed electric car? Sure, it will take it. Why not put two seperate 50 amp switches to charge TWO cars overnight sure...
The FUCKING electric company bill will QUICKLY outstrip our ability to maintain payments within a year.
Fortunately with only... 42,000 dollars minus about 11,000 in fed income tax credits and minus 8900 in state income tax credits I can put sufficient solar on top of my roof facing south to feed the damn thing by daytime and still break even.
Do I have 45 thousand dollars to do solar right? Hell.. make that HAY-UL No. 45K To deploy a Solar array large enough to 100% satisfy my 6000 or less kWh Annual required electricity is not worth it. I will be paying approximately 600 per year with about 3% inflation in costs and over 25 years = $15450 total paid to the electric company.
Suppose everything everywhere went gaga at night feeding electric everything all day and all night, doubling, tripling our national grid to see sections fail during tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms etc etc etc.... CRAZY.
Does not one person see the folly?
Christ, the damn house was only 24 thousand when we bought it at estate 12-14 years ago and the frigging appriasals for revenue taxes are so low, the damn expenses required of geo, solar or wind will be more than what the place is worth.
GIVE me a break damn it.
Until then Gas and desiel is CHEAP and paying the Electric company with a extremely efficient house is even cheaper.
*Thumbs nose.
Pardon?
(For sure I'm missing why this passionate reply was sent my way.)
Nope nobody has 45 k to solar panel their roof. But they sure as hell have 60k for a 4x4 to pull their 40k boat or their 50k trailer, or to buy a 100k motorhome.
No, knocking 200 sq ft off that 4,000 sq foot new home certainly isn't an option either! Where will I store my quad?
The real ability it seems everbody is lacking is the ability to think ahead.
*Blinks a few moments and then falls over the coffee pot...
I have really shot off my mouth this time bitching about 45 measly own dollars when I see a whole county filled with toys that you have listed ready to go fishing every weekend.
I have been blind. Blind I tell ya? too self absorbed in my stinking little runt home while I should be looking about the county and counting all the vehicles listed and thier values.
I hang my head in shame. Not just for myself but for the Citizens as well.
appy polly logies Hungry. Didn't necessarily mean you. Just see a lot of it around where I am at. I projected, excuse.
You nailed it right. There are very expensive toys pulling boats and trailers plus whatever else up to and including motor coaches and RV's You called it!
I was the one who have not been truly seeing. Now I see.
Thank you. =)
Building cities in the middle of deserts is expensive.
Your solution is?
NG for now RR. Its the only option. Start building nucs and breeders, invest heavily in energy storage technologies.(we spend around 20 Million bucks a year on battery research, which is a joke) Stuff we should have started doing 35 years ago, a job the DOE was tasked with by Carter, which never was done...
Well, we sure do have a lot of it, NG that is. I worked after high school at a butane/propane supplier. We off loaded rail cars of the stuff into storage tanks and loaded up the company's road trucks. Distribution was made to rural home tanks. The company had been in business for over 40 years and never an accident that caused loss of life. There is an unnatural paranoia to nat gas. The company had converted all the city buses to NG and we fuelled them daily. All the company trucks (also was a building material company with a retail store) were NG powered. The gasoline engines were pretty easy to convert. We also did conversions of gas dryers, water heaters, etc to NG. Simple stuff.
True to the old saying -- this is NOT rocket science.
In addition, large areas of the country already have NG infrastructure in place. Refueling the car could (and is) done in the garage overnight. Many more issues here RR that make electric vehicles completely impractical , but I have become weary of rehashing them...
We have become a nation of wishful thinkers and the results are before us...
I agree .... nuke. Take a look at pebble bed and thorium.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
Also, with just a few solar panels on my roof and a couple of batteries, I can generate and store 12VDC which I can then use to power some of my electronic devices that run on DC anyways. No expenses related to pure sine inverters and grid tie-in. I wonder if the future does not hold parrallel wiring for each home, both AC and locally generated DC by either solar or wind.
Yeah, the maintenance should be minimal. There's just nobody around who can do it.
I believe that may be non sequitur
Yeah, if enough people bought them and created a demand for maintenance pro's with the skills... uh, how does that whole demand/supply thing work again?
Thanks for comin' out!
I loathe these so called all electric vehicles. I fear several things.
Electric bill through the roof, Required to replace the vehicle battery in a few years, tiny vehicle not strong for america's crumbling roads, not enough get up and go to play in cut throat commute etc etc etc.
I saw a "Fit" the other day, a kind of Car. It was so small it will fit neatly into the bed of my truck behind the cab. I could not stand it. We have go karts bigger than that at the fun park.
I have replaced my entire house's electric system that failed and now am pulling about 12 kw per day instead of 40-50 kw per day.
I aint adding to the load on the house without buying wind, geo or solar to help offset the existing load. I hope to buy solar suffcient for 20 kw/day and export the overage to the grid for a small income.
In the meantime, I am holding on tight to the old gas cars and trucks with desiel.
Having said that, I wont argue with the technology. Show me a Hybrid 18 wheeler that can provide 30 miles to the gallon or more on equiviant load of charge/hybrid off 300 gallons of desiel instead of 600 horses for 7 miles per gallon and a fill every 30 hours or 1200 miles whichever is first.
sounds like you're part of the solution not part of the problem. horses were much better than the first gas cars but not the ten millionth. the electric 18 wheeler is coming. i'm waiting too (and haven't done much to decrease my carbon footprint beyond "gore" lights, new 4 cylinder car and a vasectomy at 21).
electric cars are about as practical as opening the door on your refrigerator to cool your house. Now, had we built nuclear plants and invested heavily in battery research many, many years ago, this would be a different story. But for now, electric cars are a curiosity item only, scaleability is simply impossible at this point and our crumbling electric infrastructure simply can't carry the load. NG is our only viable option for vehicles at this juncture...(on any reasonable scale)
But we don't have to do it all overnight, do we?
It's not like somebody's going to flip a switch and turn our oil off overnight. Oil will get gradually more expensive over the next few decades, increasing incentives to build nuclear plants and improve the grid.
How long did it take to wire the nation for Internet, cell phones and cable TV?
It won't be easy, quick or cheap but this certainly can be done.
(Although I suspect we'll prefer coal over nuclear when push comes to shove.)
gotta start somewhere and after 100 years with gas engines, I think we should be trying to innovate, even if some of it will be failed expirements.
The thing I like about electric cars is the fact the electricity can be be generated in many different ways, so in future, if we have something way better than current solar, coal burning whatever, we still already have grid and battery technology to use whatever power source affordable. I don't like that cars now can only burn oil, and most oil can not be sourced from US. Natural gas, coal, wind, solar, nuke whatever can come from us domestically, and if one gets to expensive can swith to another...its not that difficult to do this on a power plant level(here in st.paul we have such a mulitple fuel power plant) but much hard to change all the cars on the road and change all fueling stations...but electric grid already with us
and of course with electricity, even if it comes from a coal plant, at least the cities and roads where everyone lives are not filled with the smog, it is at least concentrated at coal plants, which are generally a bit more removed from population and of course, hopefully there will be other alternatives to coal that don't pollute our air. LA is a much more wonderful, beautiful place when the wind is blowing and the sky is clear, if it could be like that everyday, I'm sure if would be of some value to people, besides the health benefits to those in vulnerable situations (asthmatics, elderly etc)
Markets and competition drive innovation...seed a market with govt support then get out of the way and let the market do what it does and see if any good can come of it.
With all the new materials technology, especiallyw with nano-technology, coming online, I think some great innovations in energy storage are no the way. I recently read that some car guys think the can have the body of the car be made of material that will also let it function as the car battery
"...invested heavily in battery research many, many years ago, this would be a different story. But for now, electric cars are a curiosity item only, scaleability is simply..."
Hulk The 1970's called, it wants it's cynical perspective on electric cars back.
Just sayin', your attitude is a bit regressive.
A bit off-topic:
Is it just me or does it seem every alternative energy has to jump through fifty times as many hoops as the filthy black stuff?
Windpower: it kills birds.
Oil: Too obvious, no need to go there. See Gulf of Mexico, Syncrude tailings ponds. Won't mention the wars...
Solar: Doesn't work in the shade.
Oil: Doesn't work when there isn't any more.
Electric Cars: Too quiet.
Oil: Ever hear a Harley drive up and down the alley at 2 in the morning?
Wave Power: I live inland, could kill a fish.
Oil: GOM again on both counts
Geothermal: I don't live in Iceland. You have to drill holes in the ground.
Oil: I don't live in Iraq. You have to drill holes in the ground.
And on and on....
It's not easy to get out of the "this is how it MUST BE" perspective.
Of *course* people have to commute over 100 miles a day. That's where the jobs are!
Of *course* we need the incredibly high energy density of gasoline. An ICE is only 10% efficient!
Of *course* we need huge armored metal boxes to get around at 75 miles per hour. Going 75 miles per hour in a tiny lightweight metal box wouldn't be safe! I can't go slower than 75mph because of my 100 mile commute!
Of *course* the electrical cost is crazy high. We have no choice but to generate all our electricity hundreds of miles away and pipe it around the country on a crumbling infrastructure! This is important, too--how could I make coffee without electricity?
It's a social problem, not a technical one. "Dominant perspective" is dictated by social norms, not human capacity.
There will be a few folks who move in the direction of increased efficiency of lifestyle, rather than increased expense. If these folks are good role-models for their neighbors, just maybe that way of thinking will spread, and these discussions won't sound so stupid in 20-30 years.
Indeud.
Over a few beers I was having with an engineering prof from our local, respected, University I asked him if the new drilling tech being devoloped there could drill down deep enough to hit 100 C, and if that change in temp could be used to push a turbine and generate electricity. He replied (I beeraphrase),
"Sure, but no one is going to do anything with an idea like that until the companies with massive amounts of capital invested in oil's use run out"
Purely anecdotal, I know. Just sayin'.
I'm damned.
A gigantic Sterling Engine.
Imagine the turbines you can run with those. And all the seawater to cool with.
The prohibitive cost of battery replacement is a huge concern to factor in, no doubt, and battery freshness will be a main sticking point for resale value, just like with hybrids.
However, unlike hybrids, which are essentially double the complexity of either all electric or internal combustion, maintenance (excepting the battery) on an all electric car should be minimal when compared to either, especially the hybrids.
Regards
So, how long would the battery last if it was 10F outside and you turned on the heater! It has a heater right? and a windshield defroster too??