What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep

http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are-doing-while-you-sleep/

by ahmadss • 12 years ago

94 78 12 years ago

blog.opower.com

rdmcfee• 12 years ago

Electric vehicle owners use more electricity, in addition to the electricity they use for charging.

Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

If you read about a paragraph further, you will see that the author covers exactly that.

scoofy3• 12 years ago

Interesting data, any speculation as to what might occur when the electric car leaves the garage of the executive and enters that of the service industry employee?

The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?

jdmichal2• 12 years ago

Aluminum would become more expensive, at least. Aluminum smelters are one current target for buying all the cheap base-load power at night, as they need massive amounts of electricity. If power companies can sell that power at a higher price to EV consumers instead, then the smelters will have to compete against them.

scoofy3• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it be fair to say that if everyone needs their cars charged at all times, that we'd start distributing electricity throughout the day?

prawn• 12 years ago

Indeed there are individual aluminium smelters in Australia that use 25% of their state's total power.

Scoundreller2• 12 years ago

There could be a glut (and reduced prices) of crude oil. The expensive oil sands projects could take a dive. Planes/ships could become a lot cheaper to operate.

vxNsr• 12 years ago

You could always invest in a nuclear power company. Regardless of Obama's fear of anything his personal friends don't own, we're gonna need to upgrade our electric infrastructure somehow and solar and wind just don't scale like gen IV nuclear does.

In case anyone misses the point: for the past 6 years the ADministration has been dragging it's feet in building new Nuclear power plants that are a lot "greener" than current ones and are obviously way "greener" than coal.

cowsandmilk• 12 years ago

what are you talking about?

Fukushima killed the political climate for nuclear. Obama had proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plants[1]. No one in Congress was going to vote for that with a nuclear meltdown in the news.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-pow...

joosters3• 12 years ago

An interesting article. Some of the comparisons are a little odd, though. The author makes the point that households with an EV are wealthier. Why then, compare their electricity use with a typical household if we have established that an EV owner is not a typical household to begin with?

It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change?

Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I'd guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a 'typical household'.

bglazer• 12 years ago

I hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Perhaps the author is making a point about the owners of electric cars not being particularly "green" because of their huge houses.

joosters3• 12 years ago

I'd expect the wealth-corrected data to make the EV owners look even better, since they'd be comparing them against households that use even more electricity than their baseline typical customer.

To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.

the_french• 12 years ago

I suppose but then why not take into account gas usage between households?

shocks3• 12 years ago

EV's aren't just about being super green, they're about being more sociable with the pollution they produce.

Instead of pumping out CO2 in our cities, the CO2 is pumped out at the electricity plants - making our cities cleaner and safer to live in. :)

vampirechicken• 12 years ago

Or the contrast being bigger, makes for a sexier article. Including non-ev-owning larger households in the comparison would have made it a a better article.

mikeash5• 12 years ago

Can't we just let people conserve resources without complaining that they aren't doing enough in other areas?

I own a Prius. I don't care about being "green". (I'm not some "drill, baby, drill" wacko, but I do think that saving the environment is a collective action problem to the extent that "doing my part" won't make any real difference.) I bought it because it's a really nice car, the price was right, and I really enjoy infrequent, cheap visits to the gas station.

Similarly, I'd love to own a Tesla, not to be "green", but because they're really nice cars and I enjoy the thought of never buying a gallon of gasoline again, even though I know it won't save me money over the Prius unless gas goes up to about $500/gallon.

I don't think I'm very wasteful in my life as a whole, either. I believe my house is smaller than average for my area and the size of my family, although I wouldn't call it "small". We use public transportation a lot, and specifically moved near a Metro station for that. We have lots of LED and CFL bulbs. High efficiency equipment keeps my electric and gas usage down. But I do all of this to save money, not to placate my inner Greenpeace. And if you want to bring large-scale change, that's the angle to push on. "Save money," not "save the planet."

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

I don't think this article is making any value judgements or policy advocations. To me, it reads a lot like OKCupid's blog posts of olde, simply crunching & plotting the data they collect purely out of curiosity. In which case, the usage patterns vs. the typical customer are interesting, IMO.

gdulli• 12 years ago

There shouldn't have been people who thought they were getting something for nothing.

seanflyon• 12 years ago

I didn't see any mention in the article of people thinking they were getting something for nothing. Should I assume you are referring to electric car owners?

icebraining2• 12 years ago

Are off-peak incentives only being introduced now in the US market? Here we've had it for decades; you can have a plan under which electricity is cheaper at night and on Sundays, and slightly more expensive otherwise.

Since washing machines are one of the biggest consumption devices in our house, and we spend most of the day out anyway, it saves us some money. We just need to program the machines to wash at night.

jkestner• 12 years ago

No. The US has had off-peak pricing for a while. Many appliances have delayed-start buttons so you can set them to run when electricity is cheaper and forget it.

mason240• 12 years ago

They have been around for decades in the US as well. Industry uses far more electricity than residential, so the focus of managing peak use has been factories to shift energy use to off-peak hours, something that the average person would never know about.

On the residential side though, our utitly (Xcel Energy in MN), has a rate reduction program where they installed a power cycling device on our central AC unit that shuts it off for 10 minutes every hour.

Scoundreller2• 12 years ago

I have a bit of a fear about off-peak incentives and tiered prices.

You're still not paying the real-time prices of electricity, for which the purpose is to balance supply and demand.

The pricing systems seem to be designed to be easily understood rather than completely practical.

As a result, the price may jump every day at 5PM, and then go back down at 10PM. But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time.

pedrocr3• 12 years ago

But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time.

If you know it's going to happen and you have a decent grid you can manage. The UK supposedly has a 3GW spike in power draw every time the BBC's soap opera goes to comercial. That's a sizable chunk of total power in an island grid that doesn't have the rest of Europe backing it up.

http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predicta...

joezydeco• 12 years ago

I'm in Chicago and I pay real-time prices, averaged by the hour. The program is entirely opt-in and has been around for about 4-5 years now.

You're right that the increasing number of grid-connected devices could lead to problems like this, especially as more and more appliance makers start to add this ability. At the moment I've seen grid-enabled devices used to back down on electricity use during peak times. ComEd offers a GSM-connected box to modulate your A/C compressor during brownout times.

But I've tinkered with a thermostat that superchills my house when the price dives into low or negative space. I guess I never thought about what could happen when 1,000,000 homes do the same thing. Law of unintended consequences I guess.

peeters• 12 years ago

There's an important correlation vs causation distinction in there:

People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities

In other words, it's important to note that this is by no means an "all (other) things being equal" comparison to start with.

nostromo• 12 years ago

A daydream of mine is to finally get solar panels on my house and buy a Tesla. My car would run on sunshine!

However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work. In fact, during peak solar hours, my house uses very little energy at all.

Reverse meter billing would perhaps net out the cost of energy used at night with the energy produced during the day -- but I'm fairly certain by the time I get around to doing all this our utility will have implemented demand-based pricing on electricity, making it fairly cheap to charge your car at night.

joosters3• 12 years ago

Just buy a roofrack and bolt the solar panels on to the top of the car :)

1971genocide2• 12 years ago

weight of car would significantly increase, also aerodynamics plays a big role in cars in making them efficient. solar panels would reduce that too.

1971genocide2• 12 years ago

I think as battery tech improves you will not need to worry. Its getting cheaper to own lithium-ion batteries.

MiguelHudnandez• 12 years ago

I think home solar is great regardless of your transportation method. Those panels are putting power back into the grid specifically when demand is high due to air conditioning.

To actually run your car on sunshine, you'd need a battery system at home. But battery charging losses are greater than the local electrical grid. So it's most practical to use the electricity from the panels at the time of generation and nearby.

Here in Sacramento, SMUD, the local utility, has a "solar shares" program, where you buy into a solar farm nearby. It costs a little more year round, but it evens out your bills all year. You get credits for "your" solar panel generation, and you get to increase demand for solar, there are no installation costs, and no maintenance.

I think utilities are reluctant to give you time-based billing when you have solar in place. They don't want to pay you peak- or ultra-peak-rates for your solar power.

lutusp3• 12 years ago

However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work.

Possible solutions:

1. Buy an extra Tesla battery and swap the batteries in the evening when you get home from work. I know this isn't presently practical [EDIT: at home without special equipment], but the idea of swapping electric car batteries is being discussed for the future, to avoid long charging times.

2. Buy an exotic and very efficient home battery bank to store the daylight solar energy until it can be delivered (as charging current) to the Tesla after dark.

3. Shame your employer into installing a solar changing station at your place of work. Emphasize the terrific public relations advantage, don't mention the cost.

Your suggestion of feeding the grid is by far the most practical approach, because it's already an option in many places.

pedrocr3• 12 years ago

Buy an extra Tesla battery and swap the batteries in the evening when you get home from work. I know this isn't presently practical, but the idea of swapping electric car batteries is being discussed for the future, to avoid long charging times.

It may not be practical to do at home but Tesla has already demonstrated automatic battery swapping on their Model S. They've timed it at twice as fast as filling up a comparable luxury gas car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

tzs• 12 years ago

Buy two Teslas, so you've always got one at home charging when you are out with the other.

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

What if Tesla worked with Solar City to sell a home battery pack swap system?

dataphyte• 12 years ago

Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically.

I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.

caublestone• 12 years ago

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2

Based on the figure of 9 Kwh to charge the Tesla, this is less than 1 gallon of gas. Pretty efficient.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Do you have to wake up in the middle of the night to plug the car in, or can the car/charger system be programmed to run at certain hours?

bri3d• 12 years ago

Most EV / plug-in cars (Tesla, CMAX, Prius Plug-In) can be programmed using the car screen or phone app to charge at certain times - peak power pricing is common enough that it's an in demand feature.

toomuchtodo2• 12 years ago

I believe Tesla is also working with utilities, where they can provide charge cost via an API, and the vehicle can initiate charging (or stop charging) based on the current price of power.

joshdance• 12 years ago

The article seemed to miss the point. EV owners use much more electricity at night. The rest is a series of comparisons and factoids that don't really add up to much info for me.

Widdershin• 12 years ago

It's not even EV owners, the study was performed on consumers that had opted in to a low rate night time car charging electricity plan.

Headline: Consumers use plan they signed up for to expected effect

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

I thought it was:

"Rich people who can buy expensive cars are also likely to have swimming pools and use more electricity, unless they have solar panels on their big houses."

In 20 years, the same section of the press will be running with:

"Rich people are less greedy than poor people because they have more room on their expansive homes for solar panels. Now here's some photos of their kitchen."

yonran• 12 years ago

This article has some fun graphs, but the writing is a bit sloppy.

“They are using gobs of electricity.” What? The observation (that EV car households use about 6kWh or under $1 of electricity above a normal household per night) is if anything remarkable for how low it is. Does the average owner of a new electric car drive only 16 miles per day? More likely, a large part of the daytime use is also spent charging the car. But the average daytime use is only 3kWh above normal. 9kWh only gets you 24 miles per day or about 9000 miles per year, still below the national average driven per year. If I bought an EV vehicle, I would drive it as much as possible, since it only costs 1/3 what a normal car does to operate.

The hypothesis that “EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities” is plausible, but from the given data the opposite could be true instead; they may spend all their extra electricity charging their vehicle and spending less electricity on their other appliances.

Also, why mention Tesla multiple times (and in the title), when far more Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts have been sold and are part of the data?

gmisra• 12 years ago

I suspect there are some HN readers with experience with how electrical grids work. Can somebody speak to this increased night load and presumably decrease in variance between daytime load and nighttime load. How would those changes impact grid operations? I'd guess that having a more consistent load is overall beneficial, but it's just a guess.

gilgoomesh• 12 years ago

The grid doesn't really care about load changes provided they are predictable (and peak demand in specific areas doesn't exceed maximum capacity).

There's normally a 2 hour lead time to bring larger plants on line so provided you can predict changes in demand with that much lead, there's no real problem.

semanticist• 12 years ago

'Households with electric vehicles' are defined as households using an electricity plan than benefits you to use lots of power at night, rather than any indication they actually have an EV.

So the headline here is: people who pick power plans which are cheaper only if you use lots of energy at night will use lots of energy at night.

Once you strip out all the fluff around it, this isn't telling us anything at all whatsoever about EV usage.

What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep

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