Posted on 02/16/2024 7:04:35 AM PST by Tell It Right
Frankly if you factor in the rapid depreciation of EVs, the huge repair costs, and the increased cost of electricity due to restrictions on carbon fuels, even in sunny Alabama you would be better off driving and owning ICE vehicles. However real freedom means respecting the free choice of others. Wish you well.
You don’t understand how the power grid works.
I used to get numbers like that on my freeway commute.
As far as the "increased cost of electricity due to restrictions on carbon fuels", you probably missed the point about me like having one car that's EV and one car that's ICE so that we're not sold into just one energy source. If the Dims mess up power and/or make it too costly, we'll drive the ICE more. If the Dims mess up gasoline we'll drive the EV more. You probably also missed the part where I said I probably wouldn't have gotten the EV if it wasn't part of a larger project of going solar so I can make most of my own energy. When over 80% of the power you consume is produced on site, and you have to buy less than 20% of your power from the grid, that means the Dims' future stupid energy policies mess up your finances only one-fifth as much. The 17% of my power I had to pull from the grid last year for my all-electric home includes the charging I did at home for the EV (a total of 16K miles charged at home last year, not counting the miles we charged away from home on trips).
Look if I could drill and refine oil on my own I'd have nothing but ICE cars. But I can't. If I could drill natural gas on my own I'd be all about using that to heat my home and my water and probably have an LPG car. But I can't. Solar, though it's not nearly as good as other energy sources and should never be used for the grid, has the one characteristic that other energy sources don't have -- I can capture that on my own and be the one, not the lying corrupt government, who regulates what happens with that energy afterwards. And the EV allows me to utilize that homemade energy out onto the road at least for local driving (which my wife and I evidently do plenty of).
Apparently our Deep States aren't killing us off fast enough.
Not just the grid.
Almost half of existing US homes don’t have a 200A service.
Not that Deep State cares.
#13 the replacement cost for the battery is $2,000 to $8,000 for a hybrid. The resale value of the vehicle will be nothing when any potential buyers look at the age of the vehicle.
I drive cars to the junk yard so resale doesn't matter. I assume if Toyota is guarantee to 150k, it should go to at least 180k. I also assume I could get a new battery at the lower of 2-8 but if not, anything past 180k would be gravy.
“You don’t understand how the power grid works.”
Yeah, I do.
I'm of that mindset. And I'm an EV owner (as well as ICE pickup owner). I don't recommend an EV for everyone, but it fits our use case of being the main car my wife and I drive to save on gas (26K miles last year with 16K of those charged at home), and being incorporated in a larger energy project of making our home more energy efficient, adding solar to it, and converting my two natural gas appliances to electric.
The end result is only 17% of our power had to be pulled from the grid last year, with 83% of it home-made from solar, no natural gas bill, and almost no gas bought at the pump (what little we drive the ICE pickup). Our power bills are lower than they were when we also had natural gas bills and drove nothing but ICE cars (so don't accuse me of draining on the grid as an EV owner LOL), and that's without me selling power to the grid until a few months ago. Basically my goal is being met to where my family doesn't depend nearly as much on outside energy sources as we used to, so the warmageddon cult energy freak Dims have less control over us.
So far it's done us well in the 20 months and 44K miles we've owned it (as has the solar and the more conventional energy improvements to the home like extra insulation and variable speed heat pump). But that ROI seeming to work for us is in part because I'm not concerned about the resale value of the EV. My focus is on treating it with the care I've done my ICE cars so that it works well for years and gives me good throughput (perhaps with a battery change at the 10-year mark).
Thank you. Solar is on my list of things to continue to explore as well as converting to heat pump. However right now the payback time may be longer than our time in this house.
If it helps, this tool: https://tsi.tyconsystems.com/html/nrel_lookup.htm
was spot on in showing me the average daily peak solar hours my area gets each month. I was able to calculate how much solar panel wattage I needed on average to meet the needs of my home on average (based on that month's power statement). It's based on averages, so on some days I need power from the grid. But most days I don't.
An example of how to use that tool is look at your past 12 power statements and find the month that you pull that most power from the grid. If that's a winter month, and you need 100kWh per day in that month, and the solar hours tool tells you that you get only 2.0 daily peak solar hours in that month, then you'd need 50kW of solar panels to capture the average, which wouldn't be worth going solar. But if you live in the south like me, and it's the summer months that are your largest power hogs, and on those days you get 5.5kW peak solar hours per day, which might mean 15kW of solar panels to satisfy your power needs on most days in your biggest months, then it might be worth going solar.
“unreliability of renewable energy during winter storms”
At least base your argument on semifacts. During the five day power outage in Texas Feb 21. My house was the only one with powers 12 hours a day why? Because my solar panels were making power when the sun was up and in Texas in February that’s 12 hours a day 14+ in summer. Sure first.thing in the morning it was only 1200 watts rising to 15,000 at noon and dropping to 2000 as the sun went down. It was still better zero. The average output from sun up to sundown was 4000 watts that’s 48kwh that my neighbors didn’t have they all came over when they saw the lights on at dusk as the powerwall had been full charged by that point. Their homes where dark and subfreezing mine was 75F and lite up. My furnace only needs 2000w to run the blower the NG grid went down to 6” of water vs 11 normally but never cut out. Without even basic power their gas heaters were worthless as the blowers wouldn’t run. Solar has it’s place at the home level it allows offgrid power every time the sun is up. During that freeze only the first day was full overcast the other 4 was partly cloudy or clear. The pitch at this latitude means snow won’t stick and ice melts off as the sun heat the dark panels. I don’t understand the bommer butthurt towards home solar when it should be a conservative principle to be as grid free as possible. That includes the natural gas grid.
Here in Alabama we haven't had the widespread power outage like Texas had. What little the grid has gone down for just a few seconds, I wouldn't have known about it if my inverter logs had not told me. And always in the back of my mind is how, if the grid went down for a while, how I would ration my power to get by with just solar. My extreme case example would be January of 2023 (a year ago) in which solar produced only 46% of my power consumed that month. If power had gone out for a week at a time, even during that worst month for me, I could have done without charging the EV (which means drive the ICE truck), and that might be all I'd need to do (charging the EV is now my main energy hogging appliance). I might also have to stay out of the hot tub, and I might set my thermostat to 62F or 65F instead of 67F. But that'd probably be all I'd have to do to be 100% power independent.
If power goes out any time from mid March to mid November I might not have to change my lifestyle at all.
Part of that though, is based on some energy improvements I made to the home that I should have done many years ago even before the Dims started their war on natural gas, shortly after pushing us all to switch to "clean burning" natural gas, making both my power bill and natural gas bill go up, which motivated me to look at solar and being more energy independent. So I have a variable speed heat pump to cool and heat my home, with a variable speed air handler. I have a hybrid water heater to heat my 50-gal water tank very efficiently at just 380W. I added insulation to the home. I went around with a caulk gun to seal cracks around windows and doors. I added gaskets to the doors. Etc. In other words, we're right to fuss at the Dims for their warmageddon cult and their stupid war on energy, but we should point a finger at ourselves too for not being good stewards with the energy we consume.
Given its current capacity and the fact they are shutting down or handicapping power generation It is safe to say if you replace a third or the cars with EV’s all plugging in at six to eight p.m. you are going to have big problems.
Wow so all electric house plus EVs no wonder you use so much electrons...My system was put up by a good friend of mine she left the geosciences during the covid slowdown and installs solar systems and roofs now. I over sized mine because I got it basically at wholesale cost plus labor of install.
Being Texas I still have gas heat and gas water heat only the furnace needs 120v the water heater is plug free. I am debating a solar thermal system for hot water and hydric heating to reduce my gas consumption but gas is cheap here so it’s hard to justify the capex of the solar thermal system.
During the five day power outage if the gas grid would have dropped out we could have have uses electric heaters to warm the bedroom and the bathrooms plus electric appliance cooking like crock pot or air fryer ovens I have a couple induction cook tops too one is 120v the other is 240v but has a nema plug like a dryer outlet to use out back for boiling crabs and shrimp without the stink inside or propane burner costs. It plugs into the 50amp generator plug that’s bidirectional 240v split phase. We eat a lot of seafood boils,crawfish season is starting up as well. A 240V commercial induction cook top heats 32 quarts to a boil in under 15 min. Full steam in less than 2 but I like boiled crab and shrimp vs steamed only lobster gets steam or clams and muscles. It will also heat a steel wok to glowing dull red 700F in seconds for killer stir fry. The wok hei is all about high temp you need 600+F propane doesn’t come close to it’s speed and heat level.
I like knowing that as long as the sun comes up I can keep myself warm, feed and entertained via satellite TV. My next big purchase is Starlink roaming we have 5G T-Mobile home internet and T-mobile hotspots for laptops away from home, but for really off grid trips nothing beats Starlink continental wide roaming.
Any real investigative journalist worth his salt would be investigating any connection between the Biden Regime Family and Friends circle and EVs’ most critical components.
I’d say that would be sources of lithium and Lithium-ion battery production. It should be illegal for anyone connected with either (or other industry specific components) to benefit from such.
For me, part of it is the Dims' war on energy and how they talk about controlling us. I don't know if in my lifetime they'll go full mark of the beast on us. But they seem to be doing some levels of persecution. And I even hate to use the word "persecution" because what they do us is nothing like the real man persecution of Christians going on in other countries. But whatever you want to call it, they seem to be doing a little bit more of it, then a little bit more, and little bit more. Combine that with their stupid energy polices obviously meant to control the masses.
Thus I'm trying to combat that by being spiritually strong, hopefully enough to withstand any level of persecution. And by being mostly energy self-reliant I've hopefully removed one of their main means to try to persuade us with their social credit score bow to our hedonism type influence. In other words, they'd have to find other ways to control us besides their energy policies. Which they may do...but at least for now I'll focus on defending my wife and me from what seems to be their weapon of choice: energy.
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