Irrational

Buying a LEAF is not rational. Here's why:

• It never pays to buy a new car You lose too much in depreciation as soon as you drive it off the lot. From a purely economic perspective, the optimal strategy is to buy a 3-year old used car.

• Never buy version 1.0 of anything The LEAF has a new motor, new battery, new telematics. There are going to be problems with the car, hopefully minor, probably annonying.

• The cost savings aren't there (yet) With gas at $3.00 per gallon and electricity at $0.11 per KWh, you're basically at par with a Toyota Corolla XLE. On the other hand, if gas goes to $4.00 a gallon and stays there, you'd be ahead with the LEAF to the tune of $2500 after 5 years.

On the flip side, reviews like this drive me crazy:

"Of course, the Leaf and Sierra HD are designed for totally different purposes. Despite all the attention paid to the Leaf’s electric drive train, it is essentially a midsize family car designed for commuting, running errands and weekend getaways. In contrast, the Sierra HD is a workhorse built for carrying work crews and heavy equipment to construction sites..."

How many days per week do you spend "commuting and running errands" versus "hauling heavy equipment to construction sites"? Did you know that Lowe's or Home Depot will rent you a pickup if you really need one?

So why buy a LEAF? Because the idea of an electric car is just so cool. Because life three standard deviations from the mean is much more interesting. And let's face it, no one buys a new car for economic reasons. If you did, you'd buy a bus pass. Or a bicycle.

On the Grid

Our charging station was installed yesterday. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we're buying a Nissan LEAF™. Delivery of the vehicle should be in a few weeks, so we're getting our infrastructure in place. Until there's a network of public charging stations, our LEAF will mostly be recharged at home.

So what is the impact of a LEAF, on the grid, and the atmosphere? The charging station is on a 240V/40A circuit, slightly larger than what an electric clothes dryer plugs into. But we won't use all of the circuit's capacity. The battery charger is actually inside the LEAF, and is limited to 3.3 kilowatts (KW), slightly less than the clothes dryer or an electric oven, and slightly more than a dishwasher. It's also about half of what a typical central air conditioner uses. So not really a big deal.

What if everyone in my neighborhood gets an electric vehicle, and we all start recharging at midnight? Do we have a problem? Look at it this way. Already, pretty much every oven and plasma-screen TV in the neighborhood is going Thanksgiving Day, all day long. No brownouts so far. And all the turkeys get cooked.

Now, what about carbon footprint? If all we've done is move the CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant, have we really accomplished anything? The answer is: it depends. There are a number of ways to generate electricity: coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydroelectric. The amount of CO2 produced depends on the source:

Source	Pounds of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (KWh)
Coal	2.25
Natural gas	1.4
Solar	0.24
Wind	0.05
Nuclear	0.01
Hydro	0.01

One KWh of electricity will propel the LEAF approximately 4 miles. We can calculate a "miles per gallon equivalent" (mpge) for the LEAF by taking the amount of CO2 produced by the source and comparing it to the CO2 produced by a gasoline-powered vehicle. Burning a gallon of gasoline produces approximately 19 lbs of CO2. Using this information and the table above:

Source	mpge
Coal	35.4
Natural gas	57.2
Solar	338
Wind	1690
Nuclear	5640
Hydro	5640

Fortunately, no utility is 100% coal-powered. Typically, a mix of sources is used. Our local utility, Puget Sound Energy, is balanced among coal (32%), natural gas (30%), and hydro (36%). Plugging in at home will give us 70 mpge. Across the lake, Seattle City Light is almost all hydro (91%), with a little nuclear (4%). If we recharged downtown, our mpge would jump to almost 1600. American Electric Power, the largest power supplier in the Southeast, uses primarily coal (66%) and natural gas (22%), yielding an mpge of 44.4

So, a LEAF recharging in Georgia is roughly equivalent to a Prius. That same LEAF recharging in Seattle has a carbon footprint 40 times smaller. I'm not keen on moving across the lake, so it looks like my next move is to install a nuclear power plant in the backyard.

December 8, 1980

It was going to be a long night. Greg, recently emancipated from parochial school, had discovered both marijuana and the White Album. He'd been spending increasing amounts of time in his room and not in class, indulging in both.

We were in my room, cooking up the latest batch of popcorn when Hoover burst in. “Somebody shot John Lennon.” Later, “somebody” would acquire a name and his 15 minutes of fame, but all we knew then was that the world had changed and not for the better.

“Better check on Greg.” He wouldn't take this well. The vacant stare told us all we needed to know. “Helter Skelter” was playing on his stereo. We didn't have much time.

“Hey, Greg. Let's get out of here. Go outside. Get some air.”

Even though it was nearly midnight, we headed out into the snow. Needed to find some way to keep Greg occupied. Kurt recruited him for a snow sculpture, while the rest of us busied ourselves clearing ice off the sidewalk in front of the dorm. Students heading home from the library would stop and ask what was going on. Having heard they joined us, either at the sidewalk or across the street with Kurt and Greg.

I took a break from chipping ice to help with the sculpture. It was a hand, flashing a peace sign, with a headstone. Perfect. After a couple of hours, the sculpture was done, the sidewalk was clear, and Greg was at peace.

Later that morning, as I was getting ready for class, I looked out my window at the sculpture. One of the fingers was lying beside the hand, having either fallen off or been broken off deliberately. I hurried with my coat before heading down to fix it.

I looked out the window one last time and saw someone kneeling beside the sculpture. They read the inscription on the headstone, then gently picked up the finger and put it back in place.