Considering an M3 - wondering if I'll need a couple more solar panels

i feel the same way. i'd like to replace our hycam, but not until we're back to normal. it's a 13 with 75k and runs fine.

 

Dang, guess my 2017 Tesla Model 3 was very timely. <GRINS>

Still, let me suggest looking at a used, end-of-lease, BMW i3-REx:

• Four seats yet easily handles 24x7 cross country drive if needed
• 18 - 38 kWh battery enough to easily handle daily city drives
• Tesla Model 3 fast (treated as a UFO in Mississippi)
• Get a 2" receiver kit and tow pretty much anything (include light kit)

The Fast DC charging is a lethargic, 50 kW, but the Range Extender engine (Rex) handles premium and plus. Coded, you can get about 1.25 hours of driving to the next truck stop to add ~2.4 gallons.

Bob Wilson

 

I hear you loud and clear. My investment account from the all-time high just 3 months ago has nosedived, wiping out almost entire gains from the last year. In my case, the 2021 PP purchased just before the Toyota rebate was reduced is the only "investment" that is in plus territory. I may or may not buy a replacement vehicle which may or may not be a BEV. But since we can live with only one car, I am seriously thinking of selling my 2021 PP while its value is high.

 

I agree. What really disturbs me is how the price of gas has gone up, despite the fact of automobiles getting better gas mileage every year. The same thing applies for homeowners who have gotten solar electricity. Our bill goes to zero, the utility companies profits dip, so in comes the "surcharges" to make up the difference. Hey, I got an idea for you utility companies, why don't you build your own solar panel grid on all your sites to help cut down your cost?

 

what are you guys investing in? my stock account is up 10% in the last 12 months, plus it's almost all dividend stocks, for an average of 5%.

 

I'm up 6% over this date last year. Up 47% over the last two years. Very conservative investments.

 

The smartest thing we ever did was pay off the house early. Removing that extra $2000 (pretax) from our monthly salary allowed me to retire (comfortably) 8 years earlier than I planned. It also removed some dependence on the performance of the 401K.

 

A) The fleet efficiency over the last decade has gotten better, but at a very slow rate.
B) While individual vehicles have, on average, gotten slightly more efficient, the number of vehicles is greater.

Of course, there are many other factors for the price of gasoline. And while individual choices can determine how much you pay for gas, those choices alone have a negligible affect on the cost of gas.

 

And recently, not helped by the switch to SUVs and their aero efficiency. I own one. My wife's car, same engine and essentially same drive train, gets 12% better MPG than mine. That sedan (Avalon) is being discontinued. (Both hybrids BTW)

 

It has? I'm remembering even higher prices back in 2008. This chart, going back only 10 years, is not adjusted for inflation:

But consumers have been switching from efficient passenger cars to less-efficient trucks, SUVs, and crossovers, stymieing increases in overall fleet average MPG. Many who didn't voluntarily switch, are being forced to switch by manufacturers discontinuing the more efficient cars. While total gasoline consumption did fall from 2004 to 2012, it then rose again every year before the pandemic-driven economic slowdown.

The utilities still have costs to maintain your lines, provide the 'battery storage' benefits of net metering, and transport that net-metered energy back and forth to your house. It is selfish to expect to get those services for free.

My utility has an account charge simply to be connected. It is currently about $80/year, but it would be perfectly reasonable and fair at twice that amount. When my solar system first reached net zero, it also had enough annual surplus to drive my total bill to $0, with the utility getting about 1000 kWh/year of free energy in return.

State law has since changed, so that our solar surplus no longer offsets any of the base account charge. But our usage has also grown, so we are no longer giving away much surplus.

They don't qualify for the same government incentives that we residential consumers received (and expired for me two years ago). And even if they had qualified, those incentives were capped at levels too low to have given them much overall benefit.

 

Just out of curiosity, how much do property taxes hit you each month?

 

I'm not an expert on how they have it set up in your area, so I could be wrong, but the excess energy generated by YOUR solar does not get transported beyond the nearest neighbor (or neighborhood) load. That's one of the basics of electricity. You are actually reducing their need for transmission facilities when you make more power than you need at the moment. On the other hand, the power that you use from the grid is transported from a power generation source somewhere to your load.

The ones who are being selfish are the power companies.

 

As an electrical engineer myself, I'd say that portion becomes just a semantic argument, due to additional "basics of electricity" principles in the first example listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle#Other_example_applications

or here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_theorem

The physical local transmission facilities needs do not get adjusted "at the moment", but are set by peak demands, which in this climate zone always happens in the dead of winter when regional residential solar production is zilch. So our solar production does not reduce their need for transmission facilities at all.

And that still has a cost to them, even though I'm a net-zero customer.

And that service they provide has real value to me, allowing me to avoid the five-figure cost of installing several Tesla Powerwalls or similar home energy storage.

I still assert that the selfish ones are the grid-tied net-zero customers who demand $0 bills. They already have the choice of severing their grid ties to save the cost of those connection fees. But outside of a few solar-hostile places, severing that grid connection will be far more expensive than maintaining it.

FWIW, my service provider is a publicly owned utility, not a private company. While I do have some complaints about the management, profit greed is not one of them.

 

I wish I were an EE. Math is, unfortunately, my weak spot. But there was a section of the referenced WIKI that said something that seems to indicate that the superposition theorem does not apply to power systems.

It never occurred to me that in Washington the peak electricity demand was in winter. Here the peak is the summer months for air conditioning.

 

You over-interpret. It still works in power systems for figuring currents and voltages, which is what the lines actually carry. It is just actual power (which travels in the space around the wires, not in them) that can't be figured piece-wise.

The Pacific Northwest's installed base of direct electric resistance heat (for space heat, water, cooking, and clothes drying) is still huge, a legacy of once-cheap electricity and fairly common lack of natural gas service. As a long ago college prof stated, peaked demand here is at about 7 a.m. on some very cold dark morning of early February, as people wake up, turn on the lights, crank up the thermostats, step in the shower, and turn on the kitchen stove. Appliances are better and sources have significantly shifted since, but the overall story remains similar.

But air conditioning is still far from universal in much of the Pacific Northwest, so we can't (yet) create peak demand that way even if we tried. While that is slowly changing, driven partly by hotter summers, it remains far behind the rest of the country.

 

our property taxes are $1,000. per month

 

Kirchhoff, Thevenin, Norton, superposition, ... there are so many different ways to look at it, that is why I had to say "that portion becomes just a semantic argument".