Four Months of Driving on Sunshine

MINI-E roof graphics and my house & solar system in the background

It's been almost four months now since I installed a 8.8kw solar photovoltaic electric system on my roof. The system has generated nearly 5 megawatt hours of electricity and roughly half of that clean, renewable energy has gone into my MINI-E's battery pack to allow me to drive about 10,000 miles.

The great feeling of driving an electric car and not using oil has had even greater meaning to me recently with the disastrous oil leak currently in the Gulf of Mexico. Charging the car with electricity I produce myself takes it up even another notch. One of the arguments against electric cars is that a majority of the electric generated in the US is made from coal fired powerplants and that EV's just displace the pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack. There is some truth to that but it still doesn't mean the electric cars aren't better for the environment. Every comprehensive study that I have read that compares the amount of pollution from electricity generation to the pollution from burning gasoline shows how much worse it is to burn gasoline. Then if you consider the cradle to grave supply chain of oil it becomes even more obvious. From wars over oil to oil supply chain disasters like what we are witnessing off the coast of Louisiana, there really is no comparison. Then consider the fact that you can make your own clean renewable electricity, as I do and the argument isn't even worth continuing, it's game over.

Hopefully with electric cars like the Nissan LEAF, the Chevrolet Volt and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV coming to dealerships in the very near future, I won't be such an aberration. I'm pretty sure as more and more people buy electric cars they will see the environmental and economic benefits of installing a home based Solar PV system to generate their own fuel. I'm not the only one that thinks that either, there even is a website that is dedicated to combination of electric cars and solar electric systems. It's called Solar Charged Driving and you can check it out here: SolarChargedDriving.com

Another thing I've heard is that our current infrastructure can't support the charging of hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of electric cars. This point has been countered also by people that point out that the majority of EV charging will take place at night when there is a great surplus of electricity. I can't really say one way or the other since I don't have the data that would support either argument. I can say it's true that most EV's will charge at night and you can program your EV to charge whenever you want so you can take advantage of off peak rates and charge when there is a surplus. Now if people follow my example and decide to install a solar PV array, they will be helping the grid instead of hurting it. By supplying electricity to the grid during daylight hours when demand is highest, and charging at night when demand is low and there is a surplus, I am actually helping the grid, not creating a problem with my EV. Now imagine if there were hundreds of solar arrays in every town, supplying electricity locally and reducing the strain on the local power grids. I think EV owners will be much more inclined to install solar systems, as I did. I had always thought about it, but it wasn't until I got the MINI-E and realized that I wanted to be driving electric cars from now on that I actually decided to install the system.

Soon we will see if the public embraces the electric cars that are coming to market. If they are received as well as I think they will be, than you can bet you'll start seeing more and more shiny black panels popping up on rooftops across America.

One Month of Charging on Sun Power

It's been one month since I had my 8.8kwh solar PV system installed on my roof and #250 has been "filling up" on electricity that I produce myself now. My system produced about 1,200kwh of electricity this month. I figure the MINI-E used about 500kwh and the rest will lower my home electric bill substantially. I may not even have to pay anything. It's the first time I actually wanted to get my electric bill! I'm curious to see what my usage is with the net metering figured in. Clean, renewable energy used to power an automobile! It makes even more sense to me now when I read the news about the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spewing over 200,000 gallons of crude oil every day into the ocean with no end in sight. What do the oil apologists have to say now? Still complaining about the "long tailpipe" of EV's? Didn't think so. More on the Louisiana disaster in my next post.

Another ecological disaster thanks to our Big Oil friends

After the explosion that claimed 11 lives, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon sunk some 36 hours later. Since then, it has been spewing 42,000 gallons of crude oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico some 40 miles off the shores of  Louisiana. The visible spill is now roughly 1,300 square miles and rapidly growing.

Often when I read various online blogs and there are discussions over electric vehicles verses internal combustion engine cars, inevitably the discussion turns to the fact that much of the electricity in this country and around the world is produced by burning coal which itself is bad for the environment. This is true, burning coal (or burning just about anything for that matter) to produce energy is not environmentally friendly and we do need to develop more clean, renewable sources of electricity generation. However that doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that oil is better, it just means that the current electricity generation methods aren't perfect, but it's still a better fuel than oil.

One only needs to look at the scope of disasters like what we currently have off the coast of Louisiana to see the disastrous results of oil spills. If a train carrying coal to a power plant derails and spills, we can simply pick the train back up, scoop up the coal and the incident is over. When a tanker like the Exxon Valdez dumps 11 million gallons of oil into the water or a oil rig like the Deepwater Horizon sinks they create an epic ecological disaster that lasts for decades, costs hundreds of millions of dollars and kills uncountable amounts of wildlife.

I charge my electric car on electricity generated by my solar electric system at my home, but even if I was using electricity generated from a coal burning power plant I know it is still a much better energy solution than drilling for oil is.

MINI-E #250 Is Now Truly a Zero Emission Vehicle

My new solar electric system is up and running so I'm now "charging on sunshine" as some of the others in the MINI-E trial lease program that have a PV system like to say. My system will generate enough electricity to charge my car plus provide about 90% of my home electricity needs. I know of three others that have a MINI-E and a solar array at their home. Peder Norby drives MINI-E #183 in California, Don Young drives #364 in New York as does Gordon Miller with  #217. There are probably more since many that are involved in the MINI-E program are definitely "energy conscious" individuals.

I'm still getting familiar with the system but one of the great features that SunPower, the system I went with, offers is online monitoring. It's a really cool feature that allows you to access your systems production from any computer. It gives you real time production figures and you can look at the daily, monthly and yearly production from the system so you know exactly how much electricity it has produced. I will soon have an link on this blog for anyone that wants to see these figures (as soon as I figure out how to). Maybe Peder can help me with that as he had it set up on his MINI-E blog since he has a Sunpower system also.

Finally, I can now say the car is really a zero emission vehicle(or at least as close as you can get). One of the arguments that electric car detractors always use(because they have little else to fight with) is that electric cars that charge off the grid aren't zero emission vehicles because the power plants that provide the electric burn coal and other things so electric cars are no better than gasoline burning cars are. This is called the "long tailpipe" argument whereas the electric cars tailpipe stretches all the way to the electric producing power plant. There is some truth to that argument and we need to find alternative ways to produce cleaner, renewable energies. However, the pollution generated from drilling for oil, transporting it across the world, refining it and then transporting it to gas stations where you have to drive your car there to refuel, then have carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide and particulate matter constantly spew from the rear of your car everywhere you drive, is much worst than the impact from driving an EV that is charged from a coal burning power plant no matter how you look at it.

Plus, you CAN generate your own electricity from a clean, renewable source. Which is something you can never say about gasoline.