Why an electric car?

I mentioned in my first post that I think of myself as a "car guy".  To me, that means that I enjoy driving cars that are responsive, that handle well, and that are fun to drive.  It does not mean that I have to have a big noisy engine, tires that squeal and that I can beat the next guy off the line when the light changes.

In the last ten years or so, I've been interested in choosing cars that are efficient as well as fun to drive.  I'm convinced that we need to do what we can to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide.  I'm convinced that the supplies of petroleum are finite and that easily accessible oil will run short in my lifetime.  I'm convinced that gasoline prices will rise in the coming decade.  I'm convinced that we need to rely less on foreign sources of energy for our own security and to reduce the potential for wars.

Three years ago, I looked carefully for my new car and chose to lease a BMW 328i coupe.  This is one of the smallest BMWs and I chose the smaller of the two engines available in order to maximize the gas mileage.  The best mileage that I ever got in the car was 34 mpg on a long freeway leg.  But it gets less than 18 mpg when I drive around the suburbs.  For my next car, I really wanted to get something much more efficient.  I was looking to at least double my gas mileage while still getting a fun to drive car.  My choices included a Mini, a small diesel Audi, or possibly a new small sport hybrid from Toyota or Honda, or an electric car if one was available by my mid January 2011 timeline.

The other reason that I'm interested in electric cars is that we make a useful amount more electric power than we use with our solar PV system.  We can use that extra power to drive thousands of miles per year with no fuel costs!  Electric cars can drive between three and four miles for every kilowatt hour.  With our extra solar power and our reduced power usage that I spoke of in former blog posts, we should be able to drive close to 5,000 miles per year before we pay for any electricity for our home or our car.  If we drive a further 5,000 miles per year, the electricity cost should be about 2.2 cents per mile, or about one third of the cost to drive our Prius..  And that's LOW cost motoring.  It would be like getting 135 mpg in a Prius or like driving our Prius at its current 45 mpg for $1.00 per gallon of gas.

A small company, Tesla, has shown very clearly that electric sports cars can be exciting, fast and fun.  They introduced their sports car based on a Lotus design in 2008.  But that car costs over $100,000, and it is very small and impractical.  

Mini brought out an experimental electric version of their Cooper called the Mini E that they used to learn about how electric cars would work in the real world.  I got to drive a Mini E courtesy of a friend.  What a fun drive that was!  It really got me thinking about getting an electric car.

It happens that two companies were planning to release an electric car in late 2010, which met my need to find a car around the time when my BMW lease ends in January.  GM will release their Volt in November and Nissan will release their Leaf in December.  I decided that I would look closely at both of these cars to see if one of them was what I was looking for.

Next post:  More about the Leaf and the Volt

Why is this Refrigerator Smiling, and Winking?

Making Your Appliances Work For You

As I looked at the amount of extra power our solar PV system was making and I got interested in using the extra power to fuel an electric car, I became interested in increasing the miles I could drive with clean solar power.  One way would be to add more solar panels.  That would be expensive, probably $4,000 to add enough extra panels to make it worthwhile.  And our solar inverter would need to be replaced or an additional one added to handle the extra voltage, not to mention finding the extra roof space, getting HOA and other approvals, etc.

BUT, using less power is the same as making more power.  The Cash For Appliances program got me thinking about how much less power we would use if we replaced our 20 year-old refrigerator.  I didn't expect it to be much of a power savings, but I was surprised, as you'll see.

Why is this Refrigerator Smiling, and Winking?

As I researched the Cash For Appliances eligible refrigerators, I found that some of the best 25 cu ft Energy Star fridges use as little as 500 kWh per year.  Our 20 year-old 21 cu ft fridge used about 1,200 kWh per year, according to information that I could find on the Internet.  That's a savings of about 700 kWh.  We should be able to drive more than 3 miles for each kWh in the electric cars that are coming soon, so that is over 2,000 extra miles each year that we could drive on clean power by getting a new fridge.

We found that money was still available in the California Cash For Appliances program, and that we could get a rebate of $200 for a qualifying fridge.  We could also get $100 from our electric utility, Southern California Edison, for buying the new fridge and for recycling the old one through them.  We found a great sale price on a fridge that we liked at  Best Buy.  After the rebates, we spent about $1,500 for the new fridge.  Driving 2,500 gas-free miles each year will save us about $165 per year in gas for our Prius, if gas prices stay the same as they are now.  So the new fridge will pay for itself in about 9 years.  But meanwhile, we can drive those miles pollution-free and free of foreign oil.  So we'll be happy with the payback period.  Not to mention that we are really enjoying a terrific new fridge to replace that smaller 20 year-old one.

After having the new fridge for two months, I'm seeing at least as much energy savings as I predicted.  It's possible that the savings will be even greater.  I'm having fun tracking our power usage these days.

Here's a link to the Cash For Appliances program in California.  New types of appliances have recently been added to the program:  http://www.cash4appliances.ca.gov/

Next blog post:  Let's Talk Electric Cars- At Last