

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

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joosters
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
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.

~~~
shocks
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. :)

~~~
omgitstom
Sociable pollution? The world is still not cleaner or safer to live in as CO2
is still being produced somewhere. This whole 'out of sight, out of mind'
outlook on green issues isn't a solution. Until we move away from burning
stuff to make energy, Telsa can create millions of car, it still doesn't help
anything.

I would love to see this chart and the projection of how it would be shaped if
50% / 75% / 100% of cars on the road were electric:
[http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16511&src=Tot...](http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16511&src=Total-b1)

What happens when you shift the energy requirements from transportation to
residential? What happens when you shift from high yield energy (gasoline) to
low yield energy (coal)?

~~~
icebraining
Electric cars (and buses, etc) is not _the_ solution, but it's part of it.
Lots of countries are moving to cleaner electricity production, and electric
cars allow transportation to benefit from that pollution-wise.

~~~
shocks
Exactly this. Now we've only got the one problem to solve.

------
nostromo
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.

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

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

~~~
moheeb
Or what if they worked with the guys that wrote Spy Hunter to design a semi-
truck that roamed the streets? You could pull right into the trailer and swap
there!

~~~
stcredzero
That would work if it had the Peter Gunn soundtrack.

------
dataphyte
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
[http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2](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.

------
yonran
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?

------
scoofy
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?

~~~
jdmichal
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.

~~~
scoofy
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?

~~~
jdmichal
Probably. If nightly base-load power becomes as demanded as daily base-load,
then the price would equalize and neither day nor night would be cheaper.
However, some level of incentive would still need to be kept, otherwise the
spike of car charging would just be shifted to 1800-2000, when everyone gets
home and plugs in.

And really, the aluminum smelters was just one example. As the nightly price
equalized with the daily price, all electricity would begin getting more
expensive, and everything else with it. Much as, in current times, increases
in oil price can increase the price of everything.

~~~
scoofy
Here's a hypothetical: Do you think it would be feasible to create a plug that
has a unique id such that an electric car could be charged remotely, but
billed to the owner of the car rather than the person providing access to the
power grid?

~~~
maxbrown
Isn't that in effect what happens at charging stations? Not a unique plug id,
but public access "billed to the owner of the car".

------
icebraining
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.

~~~
Scoundreller
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.

~~~
pedrocr
> _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...](http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-
massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/)

------
joshdance
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
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
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."_

------
semanticist
'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.

------
peeters
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.

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gmisra
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
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.

------
ForHackernews
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
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

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

~~~
seanflyon
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?

------
rdmcfee
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.

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

