Welcome back

It's me, not you. I'm the one who's been away. I've been experimenting with Threads, and I'm finding that 500 characters is too much of a limitation. I have things to say that can't be easily broken into sound bits. So I've decided to reclaim my blog.

I've also recently retired, after a 40+ year career in the technology field. I have more time to write, and I have things I'd like to say. We'll see how this goes.

Anyway, if any of you are still here, I'm sorry to have neglected you for so long. I've been busy.

Fathering for the Complete Klutz

Welcome to fatherhood. I can’t think of a more rewarding and terrifying responsibility. You got your partner pregnant, remember? You’re not only responsible for taking care of her every need; you’re responsible for taking care of all of your child’s needs until the day you die.

I know what you’re thinking, because I had the same thoughts myself: I don’t know anything about babies. My partner is a woman. Women have a built-in Wikipedia of secret baby information that I don’t have access to. I will screw up, and ruin my child.

Here’s the secret: women don’t have a built-in Wikipedia of secret baby information. Nobody does. Every child is different, and nobody knows how to raise your child. Except the two of you. You’ll figure it out together. There are things that have worked for other parents, with their children. Yours is different. You can listen to their advice, but think of them like IKEA assembly instructions: suggestions, not absolutes. It might work for your baby, it might not. Remember, everyone leaves the hospital with the same level of experience with their baby: none.

So dive in. Roll up your sleeves and get some experience. Your baby’s not getting any younger.

Diapering

Keep one hand on the baby at all times. Seriously – they tend to roll. This can make changing a diaper complicated, if you haven’t taken the time to get all your materials laid out properly in advance. But you’re a guy, so you’ll figure it out. Even if you’re rooting around underneath the changing table, looking for stuff – keep one hand on the baby.

A note about boys. When you first open up that warm, wet diaper and the cool air hits the nether regions, it sometimes invokes a secondary event. Be ready for that.

You’ll notice if you’re following the primary rule (keep one hand on the baby at all times) that you have only one hand left to change the diaper. This takes some practice, especially undoing the tape strips without ripping them off the diaper. Practice beforehand. You’ll accumulate several cubic feet of stuffed animals in the weeks surrounding the birth. Practice on them. Get to where you can change a diaper left-handed, behind your back in pitch darkness. You may be called upon someday.

Your First Outing

The mother has decided you need some “bonding” time with your child, so she’s kicking the two of you out of the house. Don’t panic. Babies rarely starve or explode if they are away from their mothers for less than an hour. You got this. Make sure the diaper bag is packed. Bring one extra baby outfit in case of a blowout, and off you go.

Where to? It doesn’t matter. Babies are big absorbent stimuli sponges. Babies are undiscriminating. Take her to Home Depot. Her mother may have different ideas, but your baby doesn’t care. It’s all stimuli.

Dealing with Advice

As a new father with a baby, you are obviously completely incompetent. You will get advice from everyone, especially at Home Depot (“Who takes their baby to a hardware store?”). Accept it with the love it is given, ignore it, and take comfort in the knowledge that you are the father of the most beautiful baby in the world. They’re just jealous.

Bath Time

The mother, your mother, pretty much any female will insist that you give your baby a bath. From their perspective, it’s a great photo opportunity. From the correct perspective, it’s probably the most dangerous situation you can put your baby in. Water? Hard metal surfaces? We’ll get through this with comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation.

Drowning – Babies don’t really get very dirty. They spend most of their time indoors, and are generally carried when outdoors. So you don’t need to submerge the baby. It’s more about wiping down. Two inches of water is plenty.

Severe head trauma – Remember the one-hand rule.  It’s a little tricky, because now the baby is slippery. Never. Let. Go. I use the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. Also, never take your eyes off the baby.  Don’t worry about knocking stuff over while you’re groping around blindly for the shampoo. You’re in the bathroom. Everything is covered in tile. It’ll clean up.

Poisoning – Babies don’t get dirty (see drowning), so you don’t need shower gel. Babies also don’t really have hair, so you can get away with nearly-invisible amounts of shampoo. Keep in mind; anything you hand to a baby ends up in his mouth.  As a distraction, give him something to suck on. Just make sure it’s at least as big as your fist. The shampoo bottle is not a good choice.

Now that we’ve addressed the primary bath time risks, relax and have fun. As I said, babies don’t get dirty, so bath time is not about cleaning, it’s about getting naked. Babies love getting naked. But don’t you go getting naked. Someone needs to be able to get everyone out of the house safely if it suddenly burst into flames. Keep your shoes on at all times.

Two years of ditching the pump

Has it really been a year since I last posted? I've no doubt lost any readers I may have had, so this will be an exercise in discipline rather than communication.

Sparkii - 2 years in

Total miles	16,202
kWh	5,403
Fuel cost	$626.75
CO2 emissions	2,750 lbs
Average daily use	22.2 miles

Relative to the car it replaced (Toyota Echo), we saved almost $1,300 in direct fuel costs, plus another $150-250 in maintenance (oil changes). We also "saved" almost 7,000 lbs of CO2 emissions.

We still charge most nights to 80% capacity. That gets my wife to and from work, and a trip to the grocery store/mall/church. Our longest trip to date was 65 miles up to Whidbey Island last summer.

We have had (knock on wood) zero maintenance issues. None. It's a new car, of course, but it's also a brand-new model. I was expecting at least a few first-run manufacturing issues, but have been very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the car.

A Year of Driving with Electrons

Actually, it hasn't been quite a full year since took delivery on January 18th, but it's easier to keep records on a calendar year basis. Here's the data for 2011:

• 8,302 miles
• 2,693 kWh of electricity
• 1,130 lbs CO2
• $312 operating expense
• 2 low-battery warnings
• 0 strandings

Compared to the car we were previously using, we saved approximately $700 and 3,500 lbs of CO2.

Memory Hole entry #1 - Ivar Giaever

"I am a skeptic. Global warming has become a new religion. I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993." --Ivar Giaever, WSJ, 2008


Dr. Giaever is a Nobel laureate. He is a global warming "skeptic". He is also a deceiver. We did, in fact, have warnings about acid rain 30 years ago. The EPA responded by creating a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide emissions have dropped 40% as a result of this and other actions. The ozone hole did not peak in 1993. Production of CFCs peaked in 1993, with the adoption of the Montreal Protocol. Unfortunately, CFCs persist in the atmosphere for decades. The ozone hole continued to increase in size, with the peak occurring in 2006.


I have no doubts of Dr. Giaever's qualifications in the field of superconductivity. He should leave climate science to others.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Haven't updated on the Leaf recently. Sparkii continues to plug along, doing duty as our primary vehicle. He takes my wife to work, my son to school, all of us to the store. Power consumption is beginning to climb as the temperature begins to drop. Here's a chart showing how driving range has varied with temperature over the past 11 months:

So what's going on? Is the cold affecting the battery? Are EVs a failure in freezing temperatures? Not really. Thinking outside the box just a bit, cold storage facilities use electric forklifts. And it gets a lot colder inside a meat locker (-35C) than it does around here. So what is it? It's the heater:

Internal combustion engines are notoriously inefficient. Only 20-25% of the energy from gasoline goes into moving the car forward. The rest is turned into heat. As I'm fond of saying, "gas engines are an 80% efficient furnace that provide locomotion as a by-product".

Not so with electric motors, I'm afraid. On the plus side, a typical electric motor converts 90% of input energy into motion. On the minus side, there is almost no waste heat to keep us comfortable on frosty mornings. So we have to dip into our precious stored electrical energy to heat the car. You can see from the chart above that as the temperature has dropped, our accessory (non-motor) consumption has climbed from the low single-digits to nearly 25% of the total.

Still, I prefer having an efficient electric motor and being in control of our energy/comfort trade-off. We can always follow President Carter's advice and put on a sweater.

August Leaf update

	Odometer	Miles	Kwh	Mi/KWh	Cost	Per mile	MPGe	Temp(F)
March 2011	2118	650	208	3.1	$24.13	$0.037	105.3	45.1
April 2011	2958	840	272	3.1	$31.55	$0.038	104.1	45.5
May 2011	3570	612	185	3.3	$21.46	$0.035	111.5	52.3
June 2011	4259	689	177	3.9	$20.53	$0.030	131.2	59.4
July 2011	4911	652	173	3.8	$20.07	$0.031	127.0	64.2
August 2011	5664	753	194	3.9	$22.50	$0.030	130.8	66.0

This will probably be the last Leaf-focused update for a while. Owning the first mass-market electric vehicle has been far less dramatic than anticipated. Another month gone by without stalling out on the highway, exploding in flames, or blacking out the neighborhood. I keep looking for an excuse to visit the dealership, just to say "Hi". But our first scheduled service isn't for another 5 months, and that's to rotate the tires and change the cabin air filter.

So, is the Leaf the perfect car? Any vehicle is a compromise. We're limited to 100 miles before a lengthy recharge, we can't tow a boat, or haul 20 bags of compost home from the nursery. But we can do pretty much all of our everyday driving without burning fossil fuels. Think about that as information about the Keystone pipeline and the Alberta tar sands begins to hit the mainstream media. Do you want to continue to be part of the problem, or do you want to be part of the solution?

Range Anxiety

Photo by: Chandra Ramkumar

Another uneventful month of EV driving. Total mileage was down slightly to 650. Electric consumption was also down, to 173 Kwh, for an average of 3.8 miles per Kwh. I think we crossed the line from heating to cooling, and running the A/C a few times has increased our e- consumption slightly.

Did have one episode of range anxiety this month. No, not in the Leaf. It was in my daughter's Toyota, driving back from Arizona. Getting on towards nightfall, running low on fuel. That's when I realized we were on a stretch of freeway without any services. How many miles of range did I have left? How far to the nearest gas station? Oh, if only I had a telematics system that could tell me these things. Then maybe I wouldn't feel so anxious.

The story has a happy ending, but just barely. We found the only gas station in a 110-mile stretch. It was still open. We filled the tank, and they promptly shut down for the night.

June recap

	Odometer	Miles	Kwh	Mi/KWh	Cost	Per mile	MPGe	Temp(F)
March 2011	2118	650	208	3.1	$24.13	$0.037	105.3	45.1
April 2011	2958	840	272	3.1	$31.55	$0.038	104.1	45.5
May 2011	3570	612	185	3.3	$21.46	$0.035	111.5	52.3
June 2011	4259	689	177	3.9	$20.53	$0.030	131.2	59.4

Well, it's definitely heating up around here. Average temperatures have nearly broken the 60-degree barrier. Time to break out the cargo shorts. Just over 4000 miles on the Leaf and no issues to report. Deliveries of the Leaf are starting to heat up as well.

So why have I made three references to temperature? Look at the right-hand column in the table. I started tracking mean monthly temperature. With only four data points, it's not statistically rigorous, but there appears to be an linear relationship between MPGe and temperature, with a coefficient of 2.25 (ie Multiply temperature by 2.25 to get MPGe). Check back here in July and August to see if it holds.

May Leaf Update

Nearly another month of driving with electrons. May's not quite over yet, but I have time to post this morning so here goes. In the first 27 days of May, we've put 568 miles on the odometer and 172 KWh on the emeter, for an average of 3.3 miles/KWh. Up slightly from March and April, when we averaged 3.1 miles/KWh. It's getting a bit warmer, so we're using the heater less.

I also started tracking MPGe, the EPA's fuel efficiency metric for EVs. According to the EPA, a gallon of gasoline contains the equivalent of 33.7 KWh of energy. If you disregard how each is produced (more on that later), it gives a like-for-like comparison between gas-powered vehicles and EVs. For March and April, we averaged right around 105 MPGe. With the arrival of (slightly) warmer weather, we're now up to 111 MPGe. Using that same 33.7 ratio, our fuel cost us the equivalent of $3.90 per gallon, or about 3.5 cents/mile.

Something I've blogged about before, but bears repeating: lack of volatility in fuel prices for EVs. Electric rates are typically controlled by a public utility commission. They go up (and down), but on a timescale of months or years, not days. Since we got the Leaf, our fuel price has not changed. In that same time, gasoline has gone from $3.20 to $4.10, and is now back down to $4.00

What good is an electric vehicle if all it does is move CO2 emissions upstream to a coal-fired power plant?

Answer: It doesn't. Let's start with "base load". Coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric are all base load sources of electricity. Utilities use base load power to service the typical needs of their customers. Utilities keep base load plants running 24x7 whether they need the electricity or not, because they can't be started or stopped quickly.

So what type of power is used to recharge EVs? Most EV owners plug their cars in at night, when overall demand for electricity is low. They make use of capacity that would otherwise go to waste. Remember, base load plants run 24x7, producing CO2 whether or not they're generating electricity. EVs are an option for turning the waste CO2 into something useful.

Finally, sources of electricity will get cleaner over time. Wind, solar, geothermal, tidal are all means of generating electricity without producing CO2. Gasoline will just get dirtier. Deep-water wells, tar sands, oil shale, and coal oil are all methods for squeezing out the last drops of fossil fuel, but at an ever-increasing cost to the wallet and the environment.

String Theory

Photo by: Mike Bonnell

As often happens on the ride into work, my mind began to wander. On this particular morning, I started thinking about string theory and manifolds. Specifically, I started counting dimensions. There were the basic three. Plus, I was moving at the time, so that makes four. But then I noticed the changes in temperature as I moved into and out of shaded areas. Five? Birds singing ahead on the right and behind on the left. Six. Heavy scent of cherry blossoms. Cinnamon rolls. Seven. Descending, then climbing. Gravity. Eight.

How many dimensions in your universe?

April Leaf Update

Well, for starters, leaves are finally beginning to appear. And the cherry tree is in full bloom. We're currently struggling through the coldest Spring on record. As a result, the April numbers for the Leaf aren't much better than March: 840 miles and 272 KWh, for an average of 3.1 miles/KWh. At $0.12 per KHw, it's costing us about $0.038/mile to fuel up. At the current price of $4.10 per gallon (yikes!), we're getting the equivalent of 105 MPG.

Otherwise, no issues to report. We did get the service bulletin from Nissan about an issue with the fault detection system. Even though our car isn't affected, Nissan still wants us to have Sparkii reprogrammed just to be on the safe side.

Finally, starting this week, I'm going to answer some commonly-asked questions about EV ownership. This week's question:

How long does it take to recharge the Nissan Leaf?

Answer: 10 seconds. We typically charge the car at night. After parking Sparkii in the garage, I open the hatch cover and plug in. Then I proceed into the house. At 11 PM, the timer goes off and the charger starts up. How long does the charger run? Don't know, don't care. What I do know is I start the next day with a full "tank" of fuel. By way of contrast, how long does it take to put gasoline in your car? If you add up driving to a filling station, waiting in line, pumping the gas, and paying, is it 10 minutes? 15 minutes? With an EV, your "filling station" is at home, and the car refills itself.

Early Days

These are definitely early days with respect to electric vehicles. Level 2 (240v) and Level 3 (480v) public chargers are few and far between. For the most part, EV owners are charging at home and limiting their trips in order to make it back home before running out of stored energy.

Within a few years, the situation will be quite different. Two federally-funded programs (The EV Project and ChargePoint America) are busy installing public charging stations in major metropolitan areas. Electron stations will soon be nearly as ubiquitous as gas stations.

Remember, the automobile existed before gas stations. Back then, you bought your fuel from a druggist or grocer. If you didn't plan your trips carefully, you hired a horse to tow you to the next town, accompanied by the usual comments of "Only a fool would buy an automobile." "A horse never runs out of fuel, there's grass everywhere."

The difference this time is there already exists a nationwide distribution network for EV fuel. It's called the grid. Electricity is everywhere. So although filling up at a high power charging station is more convenient, it's not required. Simply pull out your 110v trickle charger and ask the nearest homeowner if you can borrow a cup of electrons.

LEAF update

Another uneventful month of driving with electrons. Our EV Project-supplied Blink EVSE arrived this month, so now we get all kinds of statistics (see above). The Blink was installed on the 7th, so this is roughly 75% of the monthly total. Mileage isn't shown, but was 650.5 for the same period. Extrapolating for the entire month would put us at 870 miles and 280 KWh, for an average of 3.1 miles/KWh or $0.038/mile. If we were buying gasoline instead (at the current local price of $3.90/gallon for regular), it would be the equivalent of 100 MPG.

But I didn't want to talk about cost. As I said before, if you were buying a car on purely economic grounds, you wouldn't -- you'd get a bicycle or a bus pass. We bought the LEAF because the idea of an electric car was just so cool. We missed out on EVs the first time around, so I wanted to make sure we were part of the renaissance.

Completely unexpected was how much fun this car would be to drive. Nissan really did their homework. Gen 1 electric cars (and golf cars, and forklifts, and drag racers) gave you 100% torque instantly. Kind of a hard shove in the small of the back. But once you've got your torque, that's it. You don't get any more. So you have this sensation of the car running out of steam as the speed increases.

The LEAF builds up torque quickly, but continues to add more even as the speed increases. If you step hard on the accelerator, you think "V6 sport coupe", not "overpriced golf cart". All good things must come to an end, and the torque eventually levels off, but from 0 to 40, it's the quickest car in the morning grand prix.

Karma

Payback time. No, not gas prices. The weather. Back in January, I posted about the "normal" winter we'd been having instead of the anticipated "Snowpocalypse 2011". That changed about a month later. If you look at the temperature plot above, you'll see a dip, leading up to March 1st. Unseasonably cold temperatures and convergence zones blessed us with 8" of snow that stuck around for about a week. From now on, I keep my mouth shut.

I haven't updated you on our Nissan LEAF for a while. There's a simple reason for that: nothing really interesting has happened. Which may be interesting in its own right. The LEAF has turned out to be an ordinary car with one exception -- it runs on electricity. We drive it during the day, we plug it in at night, and we don't stop at gas stations anymore. Karma's painful, so I'm not going to say, "I told you so!". But I started needling my wife a few years ago about her solo-driver commute. I asked her, "What are you going to do when gasoline hit $10 a gallon? You need to figure out some way to get to work that doesn't involve burning oil." Well, we did. Of course, I would rather she rode a bicycle, but this is probably more practical for most people.

The one change that has occurred in the past month is the installation of our Blink charging station. The Blink has a touch-screen menu system, wireless connectivity, and web access. It also tracks our actual electricity consumption. Since we don't have a separate meter for the car, I've been trying to estimate based on data coming from the car's telematics system. Turns out my estimate was a bit off. We're actually averaging a bit over 3 miles per KWh, when you measure it straight from the wall.

Based on a rate of $0.116 per KWh, our fuel costs are just under $0.04 per mile. That compares with just over $0.10 per mile for the car my wife was using (Toyota Echo), and $0.19 per mile for the minivan we traded in (Toyota Sienna). As a family, we're still buying gasoline. But the oil burners have been shuffled so that the highest-mileage child drives the car with the highest MPG. My son, when he starts driving in a couple of years, will be getting one of these.

One Month Off the Pump

We've had our Nissan LEAF for one month now. In that time, we've traveled 945 miles, consumed 225 KWh of electricity, and grown 83 virtual "trees". No issues with the car so far (knock on wood). We have learned to ignore the range estimator, putting our faith in the battery gauge. I also bought a ChargePoint prepaid card to take advantage of public charging stations, although we haven't used it yet.

We emitted 350 fewer lbs of carbon dioxide versus the previous vehicle. That's based on PSE's current load mix (32% coal, 36% hydro, 30% natural gas). Given current prices, it's likely that PSE will be using more natural gas and renewables, and less coal in the future, so things should only get better.

We don't get a separate electric bill for the LEAF, so it's a little hard to determine precisely what the actual costs have been. Using the 225 KWh reported by Carwings and a rate of $0.11 per KWh, figure around $25 for the month. By way of comparison, if we had been driving our Toyota Echo instead, we would have used 30 gallons of gasoline, at $3.30 per gallon, for a total of $100.

Which brings me to my final point. During the month we've had the LEAF, electric rates have gone from $0.11 per KWh to $0.11 per KWh. Electric rates are controlled by the utility commission. Local gasoline prices have gone from $3.20 per gallon to $3.45 per gallon. Gasoline prices fluctuate based on supply and demand, market speculation, unrest in the Middle East, and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know about you, but I like knowing what my transportation costs are going to be more than a few days in advance.

Horizontal Fracking Isn't the Answer

"New drilling method opens vast oilfields in US"

Bully for Exxon. Hurrah for Chevron. Three cheers for BP. Renewed cries of "Drill baby, drill!" Horizontal fracking certainly has tangible benefits for large, multinational corporations. What's in it for me?

Freedom from despotic regimes? Don't think so. Last time I looked, I don't buy crude oil -- I buy gasoline (at least, I used to). The gasoline I buy is produced by an independent refiner (Tesoro, in my case). Tesoro buys crude oil from the lowest-cost source at the time they need the next tankerful. Louisiana? North Dakota? Venezuela? Oil is a global commodity. The gasoline in my car may have been refined from foreign oil or domestic. In fact, unless you live in a country where the mineral resources are owned by the state, there is no such thing as domestic oil.

Energy independence? Nope. In the United States, mineral resources are not owned by the government, they are owned by the corporations that extract them. After buying a lease and paying royalties, the multinational owns the oil free and clear. They can sell it here, or they can ship it overseas. Or did you miss the fact that the Macondo well was operated by British Petroleum?

Lower gasoline prices? Sorry, bub. Repeat after me: oil is a global commodity. If we aren't willing to pay top dollar for it, there's someone else who is. To quote from the article referenced above:

US shale oil, on the other hand, will only supply one to two percent of world consumption by 2015, not nearly enough to affect prices.

What are we to do? Are we doomed forever to be at the mercy of tyrannical dictators in foreign lands or corporate boardrooms? I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Conservation.

What I Like About Electrons

In my last post, I wrote about how the Nissan LEAF was beginning to seem like a normal car. For the most part, it is. But if that's the case, what's the big deal? In a word, torque:

torque (tôrk)
The tendency of a force applied to an object to make it rotate about an axis.

(reference: dictionary.com)

When you step on the accelerator after the light turns green, torque is what gets the car moving. Torque gives a car its get-up-and-go. A gasoline engine typically needs to spin up to 2000-3000 RPM before it hits maximum torque. You push on the pedal and the RPMs start to wind up. The engine roars and the car begins to vibrate. Even with a big V8, you get the sense that the engine is working hard to overcome inertia.

On the other hand, an electric motor achieves maximum torque instantly. If you want to ease away gently, step lightly on the accelerator. If you want to embarrass the BMW driver in the next lane, floor it and hang onto your coffee. In either case, it seems effortless, like the car isn't really working at all. Effortless, silent, immediate forward motion.

One step closer to that anti-gravity drive I've been waiting on.

A Return to Normalcy

It's been two weeks since we took delivery of our Nissan LEAF, and it's starting to feel like a regular car. We've logged 400 miles and used 96 kilowatt-hours of electricity, for an average of 4.1 miles/kWh. Haven't received our electric bill yet, but assuming PSE's higher-use rate and 10% overhead for the charging station, expecting costs to be around $10.50 to $11.00 for the 400 miles. If we were buying gasoline (at the local price of $3.30/gallon), it would be the equivalent of getting 120 MPG.

My wife drives the car to work every day. We do our usual running around after work and on the weekends. We plug it in every night. And aside from last week's near misadventure, driving with electrons is becoming pretty normal.

I'm also getting over my fear of hills. It takes energy to go uphill. A lot of energy. We use 1/12th of the battery's capacity climbing from sea level up to our house. Which was scary at first. But as long as we have at least two blue bars showing on the battery gauge when we start the climb, I know we'll make it home just fine. And the payoff comes when we go down the hill. I'll have more to say about regenerative braking in a future post. But it's pretty cool to put energy back into the battery, instead of throwing it away as heat and brake dust.

As time goes by, I'm finding fewer excuses to drive the car. The novelty is beginning to fade. I still think the LEAF is the coolest car on the road. But in the end, it's just a car. And even the coolest car is no match for a bicycle.