Posted on 12/02/2021 6:41:10 AM PST by Tell It Right
From the article, here is the point of promoting EVs:
<>By favoring a transportation system that can fail at a single point, we confer upon those in power the ability to shut down an entire civilization. And even if they don’t completely shut it down, the price of electricity will be centrally controlled, allowing a chokehold on all the people all the time.<>
As the rats and their minions continue to close down electrical generation plants, the juice will be rationed and I guarantee Obama’s people in the megacities will have first dibs.
They can’t transform America before they destroy the middleclass and EVs are part of the strategy.
Their phony bogey men are Covid, Climate and Caucasians.
Every pepper home should have one car without a computer chip in it.
I agree. And it's all the more reason I'm glad I put a 10kW solar system with 30 kWh of batteries onto my house. Enough to live off grid and power an EV? No. It currently provides about 51% of all the power I consume in my all-electric two-story house without an EV. It'd be fairly easy to upgrade it if necessary. Right now it's not feasible. The amount of money I've already put into it and the throughput I'm getting out of it is at the threshold point where any investment into it beyond this runs against the Law of Diminishing Returns. But I could do that if it became a survival issue.
In this environment where the Dims are openly stating how much they'll control our energy, every freedom loving American needs to develop some kind of plan for self-sustaining their energy needs. Below is mine.
Looking at the data from my solar inverter, if I doubled my solar panels and inverter, and tripled my battery storage, I could also power an EV with 20 to 25 kWh per day. (If the F-150 Lightning I'm thinking about buying gets 1.8 miles per kWh, that's about 40 miles per day, I drive 200 miles per week, so on average I charge it more than I drive it). With a 10kW backup generator powered by a propane tank my solar system would tell it to run maybe 2 to 3 hours per month on average. Most days I wouldn't need a generator at all, but every once in a blue moon I would. (I.e. I'd probably go from April to October without needing the generator at all, but the other months need it about an hour or two per week.) Right now if I did that it'd be overkill and would take forever for it to pay for itself. But I've already been looking ahead to what I'd do to upgrade my current system after it pays for itself in 12 to 13 years.
It's my goal for the electric bill portion of my budget to stay at $300 per month for the rest of our lives (by "electric bill portion" I include not just my tiny power bill but also the payment on the HELOC I took out to pay for the solar system). That's how much I was spending per month on average for both my power bill and natural gas bill before I bought the solar system and converted my natural gas appliances to electric ones. So far that's working out pretty well. As my HELOC is paid off the minimum payment goes down (because it's 1% of the balance) and it's offsetting the increase in power rates as time goes by and the kWh rate increases (my power bill goes up while my HELOC goes down = I'm paying the same $300/month total). On the months my power bill + HELOC is less than $300, I put the excess into an investment account that I started when I sold my used gas appliances. On the months I spend more than $300 I pull from the investment account. There will come a point where my investment account is higher than my HELOC balance -- the point I can say my overall strategy has paid for itself all while keeping the house energy portion of my budget stable. That will be achieved in the 12th or 13th year since I started it (assuming power rate and natural gas rate increase only 3% per year, if it increases much more than that I save even more because I'm avoiding half of my power bill and all of my old natural gas bill). Whenever that point is reached, I'll probably use the investment account to pay off the HELOC, then start the same project over again to upgrade the system (getting a new HELOC to double my solar system).
Since I spend about $150 per month on gas to drive my old used pickup about 200 miles per week, I've done the math on my budget above for if I get an EV, but spending $450 per month on my power (instead of $300 per month). This would have to also offset the cost of making a car payment (something I haven't done in forever because I always replace my old used pickup truck with another old used pickup truck). If I wind up paying $65K for the Lightning with a 63 month loan at 1.9% interest, plus I have to increase my car insurance by about $90/month, plus it increases my kWh consumed at 13.3 cents per kWh (assuming pessimistically for now I get none of that from my solar), but no more buying gas for that car ($3.09 per gallon at 15 mpg for my old used pickup trucks) and no more $60 oil changes twice per year (I'll ignore car repairs for now because that's hard to quantify my old used trucks having to be repaired every now and then, but cheaply, compared to a new EV that would hardly need repairs for a while, but when it does it's expensive), and having to replace my old used pickup every 7 years (but not doing that with the new EV, but in 10 years replacing the battery for $10K), all of that means I'd be out of pocket $6K (that's how much I'd spend while making car payments but saving on gas and such) by the end of the 5 years making the payments, and it'd pay for itself in about 12 years. Again, if the Dims make the price of gas go up a lot more than 3% it'll pay for itself a lot sooner.
And that's with my current solar system not being upgraded to handle the extra load of an EV or trying to make my home off-grid. If I spent the money to double my solar power and inverter power, and triple my battery capacity, it'd take about 16 years to pay for itself. That's not something I want to do: my personal threshold for this kind of investment in being more independent is for it to pay for itself in 10 to 15 years. But I can do that if needed for survival, and it's somewhat feasible to do if it pays for itself in 16 years, particularly since my solar batteries have 19-year warranties and my solar panels have 25-year warranties, with a slow degradation in throughput so that at the end of the warranty they're producing 70% of capacity as when I bought them.
I've already talked to an electrician about how much he'd charge to set up me up some EV charging outlets in my garage (this is when he was at my home anyway to convert my gas appliances to electric). For $1,500 he can give me 4 outlets: 2 of them 120V/30A (normal 120 volt outlets) and 2 of them 240V/60A. The reason I want two each is because my solar inverter allows me to create a circuit (or circuit panel) that's powered intermittently -- only when my home solar batteries are charged to a certain percent. Let's say I set it to 70%, with the idea being I need my home batteries to be 70% charged to make it through the night without pulling from the grid. Any charge above that can be used to charge the EV without worrying about making the home pull from the grid. During the night as the home batteries are drained to that 70% point, the new intermittent circuit is no longer powered. So if my wife or I come home with the EV and the EV's "tank" is 3/4 full (I know it's a battery not a tank, but I'm trying not to use the word "battery" for the EV when I'm using it for the home solar system). Basically, we don't NEED the EV charged but would like some charge if it's available for free. Thus, it'd be a good time to plug the charge into one of the outlets that's powered intermittently. If, however, we come home and the "tank" is lower, or we plan to drive the EV more than normal the next few days, then we'll plug the charger into a normal constant power outlet. That lets us choose to either charge it for real if we need it, or charge it hopefully but free if we don't need it, all in a very simple step of plugging it into the appropriate outlet. No having to monitor the solar system, going out to the garage to unplug it in the middle of the night to leave enough battery charge for the home, etc. Simple and efficient and slowly weaning us off the energy system the Dims are trying to use to control us.
All while keeping a gas powered car since my wife and I need two cars anyway, and there are times a gas car has advantages over an EV (and times an EV has advantages).
At least that's my financial plan for making us less dependent on the whims of Dims, but us living the same comfortable two-story home lifestyle we spent years budgeting and financial planning for.
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