Climate & Energy

Sean Dague would like to use his refrigerator to lower your energy bills.

A few years ago, after buying a fridge, the Dutchess County resident did something few people do: He read the manual. (He’s a software engineer at IBM, so he does that.) In it, he learned that, when the grid was under strain, the local utility could send a signal telling it to temporarily use less power. He found similar language in the manual for his hot-water heater.

This feature could save Dague money and make it less likely that utilities would need to rely on fossil-fuel-reliant “peaker” plants, such as Danskammer, north of Newburgh. If every “smart” appliance were connected this way, it could save money for everyone and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Alas, there was a major obstacle. Central Hudson doesn’t participate.

“When you talk about what it costs to get electricity to people, you also have to talk about demand flexibility,” says Dague, who lives in LaGrange. “We have the technology to do it.”

I was recently interviews by the Highlands Current about the fight over NY's climate law, and got a chance to really talk about Virtual Power Plants, and how they change the equation for what a fully clean energy system could look like.

Nearly everyone that's looking at energy systems, and the transition, focuses on the power supply problem. That leads to a bunch of really bad assumptions about the kinds of infrastructure you nee to keep around that you're only going to use 11 hours a year. Complex machines that are mostly off... don't turn on reliably. We can do so much better with batteries and demand flexibility to make a fully clean system. It's something I think about a lot, and should be writing more about.

Read the whole article, it's great. I loved talking with Brian, and I think his article really sees me and the lens I've brought to this, for which I'll forever be grateful.

There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford presentation that mentioned a “30% reduction in hours per unit” as a benefit of producing EVs, or former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, who said in 2019 the company would need to make job cuts due to its switch to EVs, which “involve some 30% less effort.” More recently, as the United Auto Workers strike has ramped up, a 2022 quote from Ford’s CEO Jim Farley that “it takes 40% less labor to make an electric car,” has been circulating.

But I couldn’t find any data, research, or even further explanation backing up these figures. Part of the challenge of digging into these claims is that it’s not clear what they even refer to. Are the CEOs talking about the labor required for final assembly, like dropping in the motor and putting on the doors? Are they taking into account the production of components, like the EV battery? Where do they draw the line on what constitutes EV manufacturing?

Do Electric Cars Require Fewer Jobs than Gas Cars — Or More? - Heatmap News

It's really interesting how sometimes the narrative takes over without a lot of facts behind it. Because the EV narrative has fixated above the drive train, it misses how much labor is involved in battery production. It's a key reason why battery plants also need to be considered part of the UAW, and can't just be placed in anti-union states.

Thursday I got home at 7:30, and started squaring away a few things. I checked the weather to figure out if I could leave out a package for the mailman the next day, and noticed a giant string of thunder storms to the west (so nope!). 10 minutes later huge straight line winds hit us, I could hear branches cracking in the woods, and then the power flickered and was out.

Power outages happen often enough around here (3-6 times a year), but usually it's 4 - 6 hours, which is annoying but not terrible. The house keeps reasonable temps during this kind of disruption, and the fridge and freezers can float that long if you don't open them. We loose water during that, because we have a well, but we have a rain barrel, so we can pull water to flush toilets easy enough.

However, at 5am, the power was still not back. We have a chest freezer full of meat, fruit, and veggies, as well as everything in our main fridge and freezer. This starts to get into the danger zone where we'd need to dump and waste things. So, after a few Google searches on my phone at 5:50am I was off to Lowe's to make a purchase.

Battery Backup

EGO Power Nexus with 4 batteries attached

I have a lot of EGO electric equipment that runs off their 56V batteries. That includes a lawn mower, snow blower, weed whacker, chain saw, and leaf blower. The packs are all lithium and interchangable. I had seen a couple of years ago that EGO also made an inverter which takes up to 4 of these batteries and turns them into a generator. The retail unit that Lowes keeps in stock comes with 2 additional 56V 7.5Ah batteries (I already owned 3 batteries at that capacity, plus 3 smaller capacity ones).

With 4 of the largest batteries fully charted, connect, you get about 1.5kWh of storage that can do a peak load of 3000W and a sustained load of 2000W.

Energy usage from our Sense energy meter of our refrigerator

Our refrigerator runs at about 1 kWh per day (more or less some days). The chest freeze takes less and is insulated better. But the net of it is that we've got the ability to largely float the house a day if everything is charged up.

But more critically long power outages are typically because it's lots of little breaks. Which means there are lots of places with power. So in the event of a really long outage, once a day I could go to power, charge up the batteries over a couple of hours, and bring those electrons home. Which was the plan I had crafted that morning, and was chilling the chest freezer for an hour before I did, when the power came back on.

Redundancy in Resilient Systems

People say they want a 100% resilient grid, and often complain about that when talking about renewables. In the North east our resiliency problem is trees, which fall during storms. The resilient solution is staring us in the face: bury the lines. Buried lines would drop outages immensely. Instead our utility would rather subsidize gas generators (which run off their gas network, which is buried).

But, I also work in software and the first rule of resilient systems, is that redundancy has to exist at multiple levels, because everything breaks eventually. The grid should be better, but also microgrids, where there is power generation and storage at the community level, and they can operate independently is a great idea. As are redundancy at the home level, like this battery solution. And not every home needs it. Once you get a set of them in a neighborhood, making friends with the neighbors means you can ensure everyone gets through the outage together.

The future is going to have a lot more of this. The Volvo EX90 promises bi-directional capabilities. It has a 111 kWh battery, that's 75 times larger than what I've got in this battery system. It will be able to run the whole house, including the heating system in a deep freeze during the winter, for a day. And then get down to a fast charger and pull back enough electrons to do it again. In the summer, it would go 3+ days outside of a heatwave, 2+ in the middle of one. If I had power I could also easily have neighbors come over and charge up at our house and take the electrons back home.

A better backup strategy

The thing I really love about batteries everywhere, beyond them being less polluting, is they are less noisy. When we first moved in to the neighborhood 20 years ago and there was a power outage in the winter during a storm, it was this kind of quite that you rarely ever get. And then the neighbor across the street put in a loud whole house generator. And then another, and another.

When the power is out now there is a chorus of propane generators booming through the neighborhood. Probably 1 in 4 homes have them. They automatically kick in on an outage. When our house goes out, I step outside, and if I can hear the generators I know it's not just us. Based on the level of din I can tell how extensive the outage was, before the facebook group thread gets rolling.

But, I do look forward to the days where the quiet of the storm comes back. But this time, folks are protected by quiet renewable energy discharging from their backup batteries, keeping them warm and safe while the power company brings back the grid.

Potatoes are the most grown vegetable in the United States, followed by tomatoes, sweet corn, and lettuce. They’re also growing increasingly threatened by rising temperatures, which can lead to a drastic reduction in yield. In 2022, the U.S. grew an estimated 397 million cwt (44 billion pounds) of potatoes, the first time since 1866 that the annual potato production declined for five consecutive years. Last year, Idaho — which grows more potatoes than any other state — saw its lowest yield since 2001. In recent years, heat and drought in the West have hindered potato production so much that Maine sent millions of pounds of the crop to Washington processors in need of supply.

The Race to Breed a Better Potato Chip | Ambrook Research

Fascinating look at the impacts of climate change on the potato landscape in the US. Climate stories are everywhere, even in your bag of potato chips.

For the last decade I've been an avid bike rider. When I was still working in an office a co-worker started riding his bike in, and I figured out there was a 9 mile route I could take that larger avoided busy roads. The last summer I worked in an office 5 days a week (2013), I road in 27 times. It was great.

Switching to largely work from home, with a rail trail 3 miles from the house, means I can get out and ride regularly. I have a standard 12, 18, and 24 mile ride based on the time I've got in any given day (I'm pretty much 12mph on my bike, so that's convenient blocks of time).

The only real downside of riding from the house is we live on a hill. So in the last 1 mile of riding I've got about 200 ft of climbing. Which is also when I am most tired. The first part is on a road without much shoulder. About 2 months ago when riding home, I got wizzed by a car I didn't realize was behind me that had drifted a solid 6 inches over the white line. That had me freaked out a bit. An unrelated set of google searches doing wish shopping for bicycles made me discover bike radar units are a thing.

Enter Garmin

Garmin, makers of GPS systems, have a bike radar unit that's integrated with a tail light. The Varia 515 (that I got) sees back roughly 500' on objects that are closing on you. You can pair it with a head unit, or a phone. I splurged and got a Garmin bike computer as my road bike has been lacking a functional bike computer for 15 years, and my birthday was coming up.

First Impressions

This is really good. I've done 3 rides now since I got it, and it sees every car, often well before I can recognize them in my mirror on my helmet. Today I had an instance where I thought it false positived on me, but then I looked harder and nope, there was a car coming up on me.

The interface on the Garmin 840 that I've got is as soon as a car comes into range, the screen flashes red, beeps at you, and then shows you an overlay of a series of dots coming up the right side of the screen. That gives you a relative sense of distance.

I've seen it track up to 3 cars at once (that may be the max). It has picked up ever single car behind me, well before I knew they where there for other reasons.

It's really good. It's better than I imagined it would be. And it's definitely given me a lot more confidence to be out on the roads.

Definitely worth checking out if you are an avid rider. It sucks that to be safe as a cyclist with distracted drivers in 3 ton mall crawlers you need gear like this, but it's where we're at. So highly recommend.

As I've said before, we did a piece of this trip 10 years ago, in the same Subaru Outback we took this time. 10 years ago it was a new car, purchased in 2012. Now it is not. So inevitably, once we're 50 km over the border to Canada, and our cell phones aren't working (different issue resolved later that day), I get a low oil light on the car.

I take the next exit that says there would be a gas station, but their isn't. I get back on the highway. Another 20km and there is another exit marked with a gas station. I get off, and wander a bit, finally landing at this Irving station. Inside the only 5W-30 oil I can find is in a 5L bottle (I need 1L). So $60 CAD later I've got oil.

Sitting in front of my car where I parked to go in is a DC Fast Charger, with CCS and CHADMO plugs. I'm am so over gas cars.

It taunts me

EV Infrastructure

From our balcony in Maine we were staring at 4 Level 2 chargers at the College of the Atlantic. In Fundy there were Level 2 chargers in 3 locations in the park, plus another bank in the beach in Alma that we could have walked to.

Level 2 chargers in Fundy National Park

I had gotten asked multiple times if we took our EV on this trip. The answer is no, because it's a Chevy Bolt, which disqualifies it for 2 reasons. The first is that it's fast charge is real slow. I only does 50kW, so the battery refills would have been 45 minutes to an hour at fast chargers. Secondly, it's small. We filled the Subaru, plus the pod on top, for the trip.

But what it made me realize is that in a more reasonable EV we totally could have done this trip. We're looking to replace the Subaru next year with an all electric, and the chargers in this corridor would have made this trip a breeze.

What was curious though, is we didn't see hardly any EVs in New Brunswick. I has a conversation with an older couple near the chargers above, who were thinking about getting an EV, but said they basically never saw them anywhere. They had never seen a Tesla in the wild. Given the charge infrastructure we saw, that surprised me. It appears that only the provinces of Quebec and BC actually provide incentives for EV purchase. But it was a pleasant talk, and I helped dispel some myths for them.

Camping with an EV

We brought our Coleman propane camping stove on this trip so that we could cook in the park in Fundy. One of it's igniters is no long working, and doesn't look very fixable after I took things apart later. So when we were coming back we stopped off at LL Bean in Freeport and looked at all kinds of fun camp goodies. Which included a new camping stove.

But a few days later I started doing the math. We're looking at getting the Volvo EX90 as our large EV to replace the Subaru. That's supposed to have some bi-directional charging features. An induction hot plate peaks at 1500W (though it would typically run much lower). Running it for an hour on max would use up about 4 miles of range on the Volvo. Realistically running a fully induction camp kitchen for the weekend could be done by giving up 10 miles of range or less.

I am no longer going to even consider new camp stove. And have been excited all week by the idea that we've only got one more year of propane cylinders camping before I'm instead packing my induction hot plate and maybe and extension cord.

Back in the US of A

The notable lack of EVs in New Brunswick was rapidly changed once we got to Freeport, where there were piles of them, including getting passed by 2 Rivians in short order on I-95.

The clean energy transition is happening. We need it to happen faster, that would be better for all of us. But it is now inevitable, and the funding from the IRA is going to massively accelerate things here in the US. Seeing all those signs of the transition while out on vacation this year made the trip that much better for me.

It's a 5 hour drive from Bar Harbor to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, plus a border crossing that went very quickly. We set out early to make sure we had plenty of time to settle in once we got there.

One thing I was sad that we would not see was this giant wind farm in Nova Scotia, right after the NB/NS border. 10 years ago I was so struck by this. We took a break at the near by rest stop and just watch the dancing of the turbines for a while.

SP Amherst Wind Power LP - from Google Street View

But we were not to be disappointed. On the drive to the park we saw 3 new wind farms (1 in Maine, 2 in New Brunswick) that weren't there 10 years ago. Progress!

The first one in Maine was breathtaking. After seeing a few off to the side of the road, we start our accent up this long hill. Right in front is a turbine that grows in your field of view as you climb. Your sensation is that you're going to drive right into it, then you take a bend to the left and pass it by. My heart leapt. It was moving in a way I hadn't expected.

Weaver Hill Wind - from Google Street View

The Awe of Great Machines

Wind Turbines create 2 incredible kinds of awe for me. The first is that of any great machines. Machines that are not of human scale. Last summer we saw the giant iron mining ports of Lake Superior, and they evoke an awe just from their scale. They are marvels of engineering. And they aren't static like a building. They move. They are dynamic. And when a great machine moves, it seems like it does so so slowly and deliberately because the scale of the thing is so different from normal experience. It feels like it breaks physics because it's operating beyond a human scale. And we built that.

The second kind of awe is what Wind Turbines themselves represent, progress. Every time I see a new solar farm, a rooftop with panels I hadn't noticed yet, a mini split condenser, an EV on the road, I have a spark of hope. They are climate solutions made manifest. And in noticing them, and how they grow over time, we can see the clean energy transition happening before us. Wind turbines are this at a whole other scale.

US Wind Turbine Database

The turbines we saw in Maine were the Weaver Project, installed in 2020. Those are 3.3MW towers, which are the biggest I've seen in person (the ones in the Berkshires are < 2MW). Every couple of rotations of the blades of these great machines is all the power a home uses in a day. As you drive by you see multiple homes worth of power be generated before your eyes.

Symbols Made Visible

One thing that frustrates me is how much we try to hide the infrastructure of progress. In my area of New York ground based solar needs to be hidden with hedgerows, while a lot of community solar is going in, you don't see it. Wind is off the table. In Vermont 2 decades ago they passed a low that prohibits ever putting wind turbines on the ridge lines, even though it's some of the better wind in New England.

I want to see Wind Turbines. They are progress. They are beautiful. They show us that we can make a change and bring in the future.

The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea.Folded down when the ship is in port, the wings are opened out when it is in open water. They stand 123ft (37.5m) tall and are built of the same material as wind turbines, to make them durable.Enabling a vessel to be blown along by the wind, rather than rely solely on its engine, could hopefully eventually reduce a cargo ship's lifetime emissions by 30%.

Pioneering wind-powered cargo ship sets sail - BBC News

It's truly awesome how we are going to enter a second age of sail and return to using the power of the wind on the ocean again.

Photo by Cindy Shebley on Pexels.com

https://www.eenews.net/articles/rooftop-solar-was-overlooked-now-its-closing-a-new-england-power-plant/

New England ISO spent the time to deeply model the actual impacts of rooftop solar, and what actual hour by hour needs for extreme weather events in the winter were, and found that roof top solar and regional wind provided a lot more power to the grid during those times than they had expected.

Classically folks just assume Solar is minimal in the winter. But it turns out that it still generates power. And that power matters a lot in a extreme weather event.

I really wish that NYISO would do a similar modeling exercise. They are making the same claims that the grid can't handle the next few years that New England ISO was making. I have a feeling the results would be very similar, and we'd find that things are going to be fine, and roof top solar is a key reason.

In Bar Harbor we stayed in a Inn outside of town, largely because it had both an indoor and outdoor pool and my daughter has gotten into swimming this year. That seemed to weather proof us for some activities.

The room had a pretty standard through wall AC unit, which was loud (clearly not going to last much longer), but is what we had. After the first night I really thought to myself, this would be the perfect use for mini splits. Individual controls per unit, super quiet, and it could also do heat in the colder months.

Already ahead of me

When we walked around downtown later in the day, we found another Inn was totally on it.

Look at all those heat pumps in this high end Inn. I wished for their quiet comfort at night. As we walked further along we saw how truly all in they had gone.

Every room in this Inn had their own mini split. These looked to be the Mitsubishi units that work down to -15F, so these are enough to provide the heat for those rooms as well in the winter months.

Main Heat Pump Policy

In 2019 Maine set a target of installing 100,000 by 2025. Just a week before we left on our trip it was announced that Maine had just passed 104,000, so upped the target to 175,000 by 2027.

Maine, like upstate New York, relies on Fuel Oil to heat a lot of homes. Fuel oil has the advantage of being easy to move in trucks (it's a liquid) and energy dense. It has the disadvantage of being Diesel fuel, so being terrible on carbon pollution, particulate pollution, and cost. Between Covid bounce back, and the war in Ukraine, fuel oil prices jumped from $2/gallon to $5/gallon over the course of 2 years. So there were always huge climate reasons to get off fuel oil, but the economics kicked into high gear with an equivalent of a $200 / ton carbon price being applied over the last couple of years.

The fossil fuel industry would have you believe that heat pumps don't work in the cold. This myth is so pervasive I've had to knock it down myself on social media. The problem is saying heat pumps don't work in the cold because 1980s heat pumps in the south didn't, is like saying phones don't have working internet. That was true 20 years ago. But a lot has changed.

Heat Pumps Everywhere

As we drove out of Bar Harbor we noticed heat pumps on the outside of buildings everywhere, and Heat Pump installer businesses as we passed.

Heat pumps are my new indicator of progress on the climate crisis. Every single one directly replaces fossil fuels, both by being more efficient than in window AC, and actually providing heat. Maine's huge embrace of this technology is such a big win for the climate, and warms my heart to see it.