News and Views

After buying my Acura MDX a year and a half ago, I had buyer’s remorse. One comment I made below this post was that I could have bought a Chevy Volt instead, since it looked like I was going to keep my Honda mini-van anyway. Well, I finally did just that. I traded in my Acura for an electric car.

I’ve been following the Volt since it was just a concept car at Chevy, several years ago. It caught my imagination right from the start: A plug-in electric car that had a back-up generator on board that would power the car if the batteries were exhausted. This solves the main kick against electric cars — range anxiety.

There are a few things I’m going to miss from my Acura. It was a very nice car. I will miss:

-Adaptive Cruise Control (I used this all the time, even around town)
-Blind spot detection (I also depended on this a lot)
-5 Adult + 2 Children carrying capacity (But I have my van if I need to carry more people)
-Rear seat air conditioning
-All Wheel Drive (never used after the first six months)
-Crash Mitigation Braking System (which I’m glad I never had to use!)

But here’s what I get with the Volt:
- Cost per mile around 2.5 cents, vs 25 cents in the Acura
- Acceleration (The Volt is the fastest car I have owned from zero to 45)
- Maintenance schedule:
   + Every 7500 miles rotate the tires
   + Every two years change the oil
   + Every 55,000 miles change the engine air filter
   That’s it! Even the brake pads don’t wear, since braking is mostly regenerative.
-Keyless entry and start
-Remote “start” (starts the climate control)
-Smart phone “start”, and charge monitoring
-OnStar
-Designed and built in America
-Just plain cool

According to Consumer Reports, the Volt has the highest owner satisfaction level of any car on the market, with the Porsche 911 running second.

I’ll post some pictures when I get a chance.

That’s how much electricity I bought from SRP this month. There is a $15 service charge each month and some taxes added on that, so my total bill is $19.21. Last March I paid $116. I would have been net negative this month except for a couple of cloudy days.

As I’ve mentioned before, March and April are the best months for solar power, since the days are getting longer but the temperatures are mild so there isn’t much (any) need for heating or cooling. I’m sure my July and August bills will be substantial.

So far the system is exceeding the estimates of the company that installed it.

On cloudy or partly cloudy days, like today, I generate less electricity from my solar panels. Of course, that makes sense.

The paradox is that on a partly cloudy day like today, although the power may fluctuate up and down as the clouds cover and then uncover the sun, the peak power is higher than on a clear sunny day. The most power I see on a sunny day is about 6.5 KW. This morning the power is peaking at about 7.5 KW.

It’s pretty clear to me what is happening. When the sun breaks through the clouds and shines directly on the solar panels, it is also reflecting off the nearby white clouds, increasing the total amount of sunlight that hits the panels. Similar to how you can get a worse sunburn on snow, or on the beach. Reflected sunlight combines with direct sunlight to increase the total insolation.

It doesn’t make up for the losses when the sun is covered, but it does help to mitigate it.

Here’s a graph of our power usage from SRP so far for the Feb 22 - Mar 21 billing period. We’re just about breaking even, as the days get longer and warmer. We’re getting more sunlight and therefore more power, and using less for heating.

The days stand out when we do laundry or a lot of cooking, though clouds can also force us to buy more. There are several of those nice days when we sell power back to SRP.

Just a couple of comments on solar power.

I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on house and business roofs. There are several benefits, but primarily that power is generated right where it is used and so transmission costs and losses are almost eliminated. Roofs will last a little longer too by reducing sun and rain exposure. And in the summer the sunlight and power that doesn’t hit the roof lowers the temperature in the attic a little, reducing the cooling bill. It may increase the heating bill a little in the winter, but in Arizona that’s an acceptable trade-off.

The negative of solar, wind and other alternative sources of power, however, is that it is not available 24 x 7 x 366. The power company may use less fuel when the alternative sources are active, but they still need to have enough capacity to provide ALL the power for times when there is no sun or wind. The big problem is energy storage — a way to efficiently store the extra energy created by the sun or wind and distribute it when it is needed. Current chemical batteries are just not up to the task. Several other ideas for energy storage are in the works, including compressed air, raising and lowering water levels, and heat storage using molten salt or other materials, but until the problem of energy storage can be solved, alternative energy sources will have a limited usage.

One of Devon’s fans started a Facebook Fan Page for him. It wouldn’t hurt him if you went to his page and clicked “Like” in the mid-upper right area.

That’s how much my electric bill was this billing month (which ends on the 17th). Last year it was $174.09. I guess my solar panels are starting to pay back! And $15 of that is a fixed fee, so we really only bought about $15.71 worth of electricity from SRP.

Of course, it’s not really a fair comparison since we were gone 3 of the 4 weeks covered by this bill. Before we left, the run rate was predicting a bill of about $80. Most of the days we were gone the system made more energy than the empty house consumed. Apollo was here, but he usually leaves the thermostat alone and rarely turns on the TV. Derek came over every day and watched some TV, but not nearly as much as Gisele and I do.

Anyway, the March bill will be a more fair comparison.

I posted a few days ago about mixed marriages. Interestingly, the Pew Research Group just published a survey on mixed marriages in the US. A few results:

– About 15% of all new marriages in the US in 2010 were interracial, compared with less than 7% in 1980.

– About 9% of white, 17% of black, and 27% of Asian newlyweds in 2010 were in interracial marriages. I think this may partially reflect the ratio of available partners in the general population. If you are non-white, there are many more potential white spouses than of your own race.

– Broken down by gender, white men and women were about equally likely to enter interracial marriages (9%), but Asian women were at 36% vs. Asian men at less than 17%. This mirrored the street scene I saw in Thailand.

– Interracial marriages in general are more likely to divorce, with a notable exception that Asian/white marriages were LESS likely to divorce than white/white marriages.

Here’s a picture I took out the window of the plane on our way to Taiwan. It is Alaska, near where the Kenai Peninsula joins the mainland.

It may seem surprising that we flew over Alaska going from San Francisco to Tokyo, but if you stretch a string between those cities on a globe, you see that it really is the shortest route. Looking at flat maps skews our perception of the round world.

And here’s a picture in the TV studio where Devon was recording his daily program, “Read the news, Learn English” (it sounds better in Chinese!). They let Gisele and I attend the taping one morning. You can see the teleprompter just to the right of the monitor, though you can’t see the text from this angle. The Chinese prompts are all in Chinese characters, which is forcing Devon to quickly learn to read!

Here’s a link to the completed show.

It only took 22 hours from Hotel to Home. That involved changing planes in Tokyo and San Francisco.

Interestingly, we got to celebrate Valentine’s Day twice. We left Taiwan and Tokyo in the morning of February 14, and as we flew east the sun set and then rose again — and we arrived in San Francisco on the morning of February 14.

Crossing the International Date Line is weird.