The powerwall upgrade, rolling outages, covid and working from home

2020 has been tough on a lot of us, especially since our weak leadership and apparently coordinated fake news campaigns have confused enough people to fail to protect themselves and others with masks, and has us stuck with a much more severe outbreak of covid than any other developed country in the world.

Things have changed forever, and we are slowly getting used to a new reality of working from home, remote school attendance, and monitoring not just the weather but also the death rate and infection rates due to covid.

The weather today

COVID cases per day

Deaths per day

Grid tied solar gets shut down by PG&E in grid power outages

Living with solar power since 2015 has been a boon in terms of reducing fuel cost and not feeling powerless (haha) when PG&E shuts down the local grid in a desperate effort of wildfire prevention. In those events, grid-tied solar actually gets shut down as well, to prevent feeding of power into the grid while crews are potentially doing maintenance in your neighborhood.

A workaround we had already designed into our 10kW solar system in 2015, was to have inverters that allow manually disconnecting from the grid, and using an emergency power outlet to consume some of the solar generated energy instead of it evaporating unused altogether. Before working from home was a thing, we figured, we can survive without the AC running, as long as we can run a long power cord to the fridge and freezer to avoid food from spoiling.

2020 a new reality, working from home

2020 with the new reality of working from home, 100F summers, and a memory of extended power outages in 2019, our neighbors and us were looking at generators, but handling fossil fuels and doing maintenance on those and dealing with their noise just felt so… 1960 ?

Thankfully California has a rather generous self generated incentive program (SGIP) that along with the federal solar investment tax credit (ITC) which applies to solar and home battery installations, makes home batteries actually affordable and amortize in less than their lifetime.

So in March, we finally got an installation of three Powerwalls. Why three?

Tesla app showing charge state

Tesla app showing solar feeding home AC and grid for credit

Tesla app showing current power flow

Three is better than two, especially if the price is the same

We originally asked for quotes for one or two. Since we wanted to run the whole house off of it and not have to worry about only powering and separating out critical circuits (fridge works, AC doesn’t etc) we were pretty set on two home batteries. Using three however allows you to use a different tier of the SGIP which essentially pays for the third battery, and was not as oversubscribed as the default tier.

So now we have 40kWh of capacity backing our home, and spikes of use from AC running at the same time as the electrical dryer and cooking are just going to be covered regardless of power outages or not.

Smart automation

The powerwall software is actually pretty smart, using machine learning and energy forecasts (weather implying AC use) in order to take advantage of our EV2-A PG&E time of use plan, which has different per kWh pricing depending on the time of day.

Just showing battery charge (below) and discharge (above)

Showing battery, grid and solar

Showing home consumption in blue

Time of use based electricity rate plans, net metering

Solar homes usually are selecting a time of use rate plan that incentivizes donating your surplus of electricity generated to the grid with higher prices at day, while consuming cheap mostly unused electricity at night.

The beauty is that with a so called net-metering agreement, you get billed yearly for the difference between all you consumed and all you produced, and they give you pennies on the dollar if you produced more than you consumed, or bill you regular prices if you consumed more than you produced over that year.

EV-A, the too good to be true plan

We used to be on the EV-A plan, which I would call the ‘too good to be true plan’ which would perfectly align with solar homes and electric driving in pre-covid times. You charge your cars over night, and they are full in the morning, paying $0.13/kWh. While you are away from home, and parked at your workplace, your home solar produces electricity from about 8am to 8pm, which happens to be credited at $0.25/kWh mid-peak and $0.45/kWh at peak time. This makes sense because this is also the time that other neighbors of yours use the most electricity running their air conditioning and cooking lunch or dinner, so it’s the perfect time to donate your surplus energy.

I call this the too-good-to-be-true plan because it essentially stretched our daily solar production which can range from 15kWh to 60kWh depending on time of the year to almost three times that when we used most of that at night for charging our cars. It’s as if the grid is your battery, unless there are power outages, but that gives you 3 times the electricity at night for the same cost as what you donated it at day.

In consequence, until we added solar in 2015, we used to pay $2400/year to PG&E, and from 2015-2020 we paid less than $100/year, each year, in return to supplying

All good things have got to come to an end. RIP EV-A, here comes EV2-A

Eventually PG&E had to fix this situation, and they went a bit overboard. They forced us from the EV-A plan to a new EV2-A plan, which basically gives you lowest price for your solar generated power until 3pm, mid-peak pricing till 4pm, and peak pricing from 4-9pm.  Also the off-peak rate is now $0.17 instead of $0.13. Incidentally, homes in our climate also need the most AC from about 3pm when the heat outside is the highest. I bet you can tell how that this is a much worse deal for the consumer/producer already, while being more fair to PG&E by pricing electricity higher when it is actually in higher demand.

Yay, driving with solar power !

Now because of covid and working from home, this actually coincides somewhat nicely for us. The car is parked and connected to the charger at home most of the day now. Instead of charging the car from a partially dirty power mix at night, we now can charge from 100% clean solar power until 3pm at the same price as over night.

Guilt free acceleration!

But with us driving so much less while working from home, that is actually not as much of a big deal as before.

Time shifting demand

The Powerwalls now allow us to absorb the solar energy produced from 8am to 3pm and use the cheap off-peak grid electricity until then, and stop using the grid electricity from 3pm to midnight, allowing at least most of the solar power generated between 3pm and 8pm to be fed to the grid and compensated at peak pricing instead of partially being used by our home.

This means, our power hungry AC, dinner cooking, electric dryer etc, runs off of the battery when the per kWh price adjusts up, and should allow us to still not pay much for electricity per year, despite the devastating change in compensation plan that EV2-A brought.

Where there is light, there is shadow

So what are the downsides to adding a home battery in covid times?

First off, understand that the SGIP comes with certain restrictions, and I have not fully understood all the nuances of why it is this way, and how much is regulations due to SGIP and how much because of other details of PG&E and powerwall operation permits:

Being able to shift power does NOT mean you can charge your battery at night at low price and deplete it in the day at highest price, cashing on on the arbitrage.

It only allows consuming self generated power from the battery, which ideally you do at peak while donating all currently generated solar power to the grid instead of consuming part of it yourself.

Thankfully you don’t have to sit and micromanage any of that yourself, because the powerwall has an advanced mode that uses machine learning and energy forecasts to adapt the flow of power in your home as needed.

The surge in demand by more and more people working from home, and PG&E having scared so many people in 2019 with random long lasting power outages, makes it difficult to get reasonable timelines and correct answers on incentives. Talking to Tesla, their sales person outright said, SGIP incentives are already oversubscribed, buy it without it, or look at third party installers that are not tapped out yet.  Some people are waiting months to get theirs.

We got ours installed by a local installer that was working with us to secure SGIP.

Another downside is that now that I can infer through the near realtime power consumption graphs in the Tesla app what consumes how much, I am even more obsessed with efficiency, and want to upgrade the insulation on the home next.

By having the project happily scoped with SGIP offsetting the sizable total cost in the end, this will affect the property value from a property tax standpoint and cost of property tax per year will go up, clawing back some of that incentive over time.

Lastly, the software using machine learning to adapt to the time of use plan is far from perfect, and switching modes manually as you try to make it better, it confuses the algorithm further. This can be quite aggravating to observe.

Where there is shadow, there is light

While the machine learning based power control automation doesn’t always seem to do the right thing yet, the powerwall updates its software automatically as new versions get released, so performance and feature improvements will happen over time, just like with our cars.

Also it has a storm watch mode, i.e. when an extreme weather event is on the horizon, if enabled, the powerwall will actually charge from grid and solar at the same time to minimize time to 100%, and reserve the power in case there is a prolonged power outage. Note this also triggered when rolling outages where a thing because of extreme heat and unusually high electricity demand from air conditioning.

Where there is light, there is a future

Being powered on sunlight overall is great. According to rumors, Tesla may have battery technology breakthroughs lined up that allow future cars and home battery and solar homes to eventually be part of a virtual power grid that uses an autoarbitter software to shape the individual contributors demand and supply of energy to coincincide better with the grids needs. So rather than having fixed time ranges in a time of use plan, I imagine there will be dynamic pricing that allows the grid to not be impacted when a central power plant goes offline temporarily. It may very well allow us to shut down not just coal but also gas peaker plants, and generate revenue for the homeowners to offset their investment into power infrastructure. We will learn more about their ambitious plans at battery day which has been rescheduled to September 2020 last time I checked.

2018 Tesla Model 3 – driving for Lyft for fun

This post is kind of lenghty, but I think well worth reading. I split it into subsections:

Introduction, Model 3 on Lyft, Lyft driving in general and the conclusion. 

Introduction

I am no stranger to teslas performance and autopilot, we replaced our last gas car end of May 2016 with a Tesla Model X, after the last time teslas stock was recovering from being artificially suppressed by lots of ‘creative news’ about car fires (despite gas cars having more such), or about how they are never going to build model x etc, and I had just kept buying on the downturns including some options. So in a way you could say tesla shorts paid for my Model X, which I also justified as a means to validate my investment.

You gotta live with it to really know its potential. And so after being wowed by owning the Model X, and my mind blown by Elon’s presentation of the Model 3, I had the hopeful expectation when I reserved my Model 3 that this still holds true, even at half the cost of a comparable model S. But I have to admit I was somewhat concerned that the economy ‘model e’ would have sacrifized some of its tesla appeal in order to get to that price point.

I can now confirm, the ride in the Model 3 is legendary and no downgrade, especially if you like dynamic, sporty driving.

So when I got my Model 3 in January, I did expect it to be more fun than the 2015 VW eGolf it replaced, but I had no idea how much more fun. I ended up putting more than 6000 miles on the car in just a few months and found myself tooling around in the mountains and playing with cornering, hugging the apex, learning how to use autopilot driver assist to my advantage in dynamic driving, enjoying different seat settings while in stop and go traffic etc, loving the streaming of about anything in highest audio quality. Autopilot is really a god-sent in stop and go traffic, turns a commute nightmare into a relaxation opportunity. Check out this small video from my commute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aB_uGz_6gI

And eventually I realized, I am spending an hour before work each day just having fun driving around, which seemed like a waste somehow. So I was ready for my next adventure: Signing up to drive for Lyft. 

           

Obviously this pays a lot less per hour than my day-job, but the idea is to do this only for fun and when doing unproductive car fun-time anyways. If I am already spending extra time in the car, I might as well pick people up and bring them to where they need to be.

It took me about 3 days from the idea to giving my first ride, which is pretty amazing IMHO, the longest wait was for DMV and background check, which took about a day to show up checkmarked in the app.

Since I drive this car so much, its uniquenesses seems normal to me now, but to have passengers that mostly never have seen one before is an interesting way to look at it with fresh eyes.

Model 3 on Lyft

I love how I can just put my personal belongings into the frunk and have an empty clean trunk for my riders,  most important when picking up from the airport.

The door handles and controls however are definitely not intuitive for a first time rider.

Almost every single passenger is confused at first about how to open the door, both from the outside as well as from the inside, there was exactly one that just figured it out right away.

My quick intro is ‘push the bigger piece of the handle with your thumb’ and then they say ‘oh wow, cool’ and it works.

When they want to get out, there is confusion again. I tell them ‘push the little switch with that white line’ and point to it. Again you would think that would be annoying as an experience, but somehow they find it amazing again, they somehow like how the door pops open and they just push it out. And maybe also because of the rest of the experience.

Another point of confusion is the window control. Nobody opened the door yet by accident, but especially when driving in the dark it is not obvious at first on how to control your window, and I often just do it for them. I learned how to turn on the lights in the back for them from my screen, and that helps.

A definite plus however is performance, looks, quality of the music streaming and voice control.

I usually ask them if they want to listen to music, and if they have a favorite artist, then use voice control to start for example like ‘play phantogram’. 

Often they say: ‘I listen to anything’ and so I challenge them a bit with bassnectar, and let them know they can change their mind anytime. Turns out they more often than not actually like it.

Also I get to listen to cool music I didnt know about before, and get delighted responses like somebody asking for coldplay and it happens to pick their favorite song. I get comments from audiophiles how unexpectedly excellent the sound quality is.

My favorite new song I am super grateful for learning about is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98bi0dxJGGc 

People are generally wowed by the quality of the ride:

‘I must have gotten a silent upgrade, normally its priuses or something’

‘this car really has pickup’ 

‘this feels more like riding in a train, I mean the road bumps you still feel but there is no vibrating and shaking, its like gliding really’

‘wow, I didnt notice that all-glass roof until now’

‘wow, I got to sell my S4 and get this’

‘you really made my day, I have wanted to sit in a model 3 for so long’

So far have been able to maintain a clean 5.0 driver rating, probably in part because of the unexpectedly awesome car  🙂

LR Range is more than enough for me, since I don’t drive all day, and the car is super efficient since I drive a lot more conservative and mindful about comfort when I have passengers.

I end up using less than 220 Wh/mile on my rides. When I have fun between rides I can consume closer to 270Wh/m 🙂

One sunday night I wanted to see how far I get with a full charge, filled it up to 310 mile range, and started driving at 8:30pm. By 1:30am and 11 rides later I had enough fun, and still 180 mile range left, and headed home, parking with 144 mile range in my garage, having driven 134 miles and consumed 36kWh of energy, which thanks to home solar I can recharge for free, but at the californian supercharger this would cost me $9.36

Lyft driving in general

People are generally very friendly and reasonable. Most don’t tip. The ones that do surprise you.

Driving late at night means driving more drunk people which carries the risk of soiling your car, but also results in more interesting stories to tell at parties (no names mentioned obviously) but so far so good. Driving before work is better than driving at night.

I now also always carry some water with me, that people are really thankful for, i.e. when they come from a long sunny day in the city and are all dehydrated.

Lyfts driver app has a red overlay of areas with surge pricing in effect. I spent a few hours taking screenshots every now and then to log when they start showing up and going away. 

Chasing the red (surge rate areas) was often not useful for me, typically evaporated before I arrived, and I get reasonable amounts of rides wherever I am in the SF bay area. I talked to another new driver and he had a similar experience. 

I don’t think I average more than $20/h, especially factoring in driving to pickups etc, last sunday night I did average $26/h thanks to more tips and surge pricing than usual.

I usually use destination mode on my way to work. It’s rare that something comes out of it. The controls for it are not easy to use, and if you correct it too often then they lock you out of using the feature with ‘you used it six times today, try again tomorrow’.   One time when returning from a Palo Alto trip back into the city with destination mode it routed me through the airport to pick up a family with luggage. He said he also has a Model 3 on order and was thrilled to be in the front passenger seat. 

By default the app is set to NOT use the bluetooth for the traffic dirctions, but still tunes out the music on bluetooth you are playing from your phone, then only announces its directions on the internal phone speaker which means you can’t hear it very well. I changed it in the app settings, but the voice quality is a lot less pleasant than the tesla one, so I am considering turning it off and asking people for the destination address and put that in with ‘navigate to’ voice command to demo the capabilities better.

Also a pity that the app is not integrated into the big screen, it is kind of annoying to look far down below the screen where the phone dock is. I wish tesla would get us a webbrowser like in the model S/X, maybe the touchscreen web interface of lyft driver would be sufficiently supported that way. It appears the app is halfway a webapp anyways, i.e. when I switch to the dashboard. I ended up buying a hands-free magnetic phone holder to have it higher up at the b-pillar so as not to block my view, but am concerned that it may be in the path of an airbag in case of a bad accident. Have to find out more about this.

Conclusion

I am super thankful for this opportunity to help people get to where they want to be while getting them interested in electric driving (if they ask). I love meeting all those different types of people, having good conversations, learning about new music and seeing the excitement when they get their first ride in a tesla. They give a consistent 5.0 rating and positive feedback all around.

Share the Love – if you want to sign up too, consider using my referral code https://www.lyft.com/drivers/WILL53406 and get the same bonus as me ($1.55 for every ride you do in first 60 days, capped at $775)

2017 coming up – two years of electric driving review 2015 VW e-Golf, 2016 Tesla Model X 90D

May 2016 we finally switched to all electric driving, after realizing that we put most miles on the short distance electric car and the 2014 Honda Odyssey was collecting dust for anything less than 150 mile distance.

Our gas station is our home 🙂 looking good freshly painted under a rainbow…

Why 150 miles ? Because that is about twice the distance of the eGolf on a single charge (84 miles) and charging once in the middle of a trip was preferable to hobbling around in even a fairly new gas car, because of the electric drive being so smooth it is closer to gliding, acceleration with instant torque, and a feeling of efficiency even when driving it without regard for consumption, knowing that the solar panels on our roof produce more than we would consume.

 

First snow in Tahoe was creating a mess. Thankfully with all wheel drive and lots of energy to keep warm and comfortable, we did not need snow chains for our 20″ continental LX m+s tires that we use all year round. Loving how the falcon wing doors form an umbrella to keep the snow out when we got in and out of the car to throw snowballs while legacy gas cars stopped in front of us for hours to get their snow chains on, get towed to the side when they ran out of fuel idling for hours or slid around on summer tires. Thankful for having all those superchargers on the way so we did not have to worry about range, despite the cold and heating while standing taking its toll.

 

So in May 2016 we traded in our 2014 Honda Odyssey 8 seater which we had loved until we discovered electric driving. Suddenly when going back to driving it, everything feels wrong, it smells bad, hobbles and wobbles, unevenly accelerates. You get spoiled by electric driving so quickly. So we loaded the Odyssey with luggage for its last partial vacation trip, drove it down to Fremont, and traded it in for a Tesla Model X 90D. We moved the luggage and went on our first vacation trip into the Sierras, about 400 miles round trip. There was a slight feeling of regret that we got the 6 seat version instead of the 7 seat version because that meant a 3-people family that was going to the same destination had to take their Volt instead of riding with us, but since it was a long weekend it may be all for the better. And we prefer the faster getting in and out of the six seater compared to moving seats forward and backward to access the last row in the 7 seater.

 

Topping off on a standard electrical outlet gets us 20 miles over night added. Not really needed since we filled up on the supercharger along the way to arrive with good range left, but definitely a plus.

We have done many road trips since then, some more far than 1000 miles round trip. Supercharging makes it easy to go the distance and knowing that it is already all paid for makes it easier to pay a meal at Harris Ranch Restaurant while filling up for free 🙂

So far the car has been nothing short of amazing. And my wife finally lets me take the eGolf again 🙂

Highlights:

• never again make time to drive to a gas station, oil change or smog check appointments, just plug in at night and full in the morning
• preheat car cabin in the garage, start from iphone while having breakfast or when arriving close to parking lot, no poisonous fumes emitted. Works on both cars.
• silent gliding smooth ride with superb acceleration and excellent traction control in adverse weather conditions
• long distance trips much easier thanks to autopilot taking over micromanaging tasks while I focus on the overall traffic situation and adjust speed or advise it to do a lane change for me. feels like half the distance driven on arrival

Downsides:

• don’t forget to plug it in over night 🙂 Thankfully the phone app sends notifications on charge start and stop so if you set it to start charging at 9pm you can set an alert in your calendar to double check that the notification of starting came in
• tesla model S and model X are still very pricey, this will only change 2017 when the Model 3 comes out.
• makes you realize how bad gas cars are in comparison and you are spoiled forever, the idea of going back to gas cars is like handing in your iphone for a rotary phone  landline.
• You get annoyed when driving the non-tesla and the driver door does not close for you automatically

 

Update:

In January 2018 I finally replaced the VW eGolf with a Tesla Model 3, which is such a tremendous upgrade, and a relief to never have range anxiety again. The sound system is amazing, autopilot is a life and sanity saver, and the promise of FSD makes it a future proof investment, or if anything, a great toy that gets more and more interesting over time through software updates. Summoning it across parking lots out of its parking spot towards the entrance where you wait under cover in the rain, sentry mode camera recording as part of the alarm system, Netflix and Youtube watching while parked, all those are features I did not even dream about getting when I bought the car and that arrived over time as free software updates in my garage over wifi in the night as Tesla figures out from customer feedback what else would be awesome to do with this car.

Even now in 2020, I still am looking for excuses to drive, this car is so amazingly balanced power and weight wise, it makes you giggle when it turns on a dime around the corner.

What if… cars moved people, objects, energy on demand

What if a car driving a person was just a side effect, one of its on-demand purposes fulfilled.

What if you did not own a vehicle but it would be available anytime like über from close by, and when not driving you or anybody else, it will function as a receiver and giver of energy, drive to a charging station, when fully charged drive and park at a building that needs more power as a power building block. It can fulfill energy, people and object transportation needs.

It will never sit idle uselessly, just moving to where it is useful.

Idea published by Michael Will March 15th, 2016, feel free to use, don’t patent it as its already published.