I'm not taking a trip like Wisconsin or Yellowstone every month, just once or twice a year. My folks are retired so they do take more trips than I. Our weekend trips are around Texas, a couple weekends ago we did the Texas Triangle. Friday after I got off work we drove* to Bandera (just west of San Antonio) for my aunt's birthday. Saturday evening we drove to Dallas for the Sunday afternoon Honor Flight pre-flight meeting for my dad (a Vietnam veteran). Sunday evening after the meeting we drove back to Houston.
Charging is now so prolific, and fast** that the majority of our stops are:
1) plug in
2) go use restrooms
3) unplug
4) resume trip
which is faster than getting gas as nobody needed to stand next to the car to monitor the refueling process. On occasion we need to wait 5 minutes or so for the car to be ready, which makes those stops comparable to getting gasoline. On the drive to Dallas we stopped at the largest Supercharger site in Texas. It's located at the Buc-ee's in Temple and has 68 stalls.
* the car did most of the driving. FSD has gotten quite good in the past year, I seldom used it prior to Tesla's 2024 Xmas Update as the prior builds were unnerving at times.
** in 2018 Tesla's Superchargers maxed out at 120 kW and we often had to do the slow-charge to 100% (charging from 80-100% takes the same amount of time as 0-80%, so during trips so you only charge to 100% if absolutely necessary as otherwise you're wasting time). With the widespread rollout of V3 Superchargers most of my charging now is at 250 kW, the older Superchargers were bumped to 150 kW, and I no longer need to do the slow-charge to 100%. The latest V4 Superchargers go even faster, but at the moment only the Cybertruck can accept the 500 kW it offers (on V4 Superchargers we'll still max out at 250 kW in our Model 3 and Model Y).
I have freedom to travel - been road tripped all over the US since getting my 1st Model 3 in 2018. My folks enjoyed the trips they'd taken with me so much that they bought a Model Y. We typically take a 2700 mile round trip each year to visit family in Wisconsin. We took my folks' Model Y on our longest trip so far: 5000 miles to Yellowstone, onto Tacoma Washington to visit family, then back to Houston.
I also have energy freedom - 99% of my charging is now done via the solar panels on my roof by using Tesla's Charge on Solar feature that was added in 2023. Do you distill your own gasoline?
For the first 6 months of owning my 1st Model 3 in 2018 I charged using the 120V 15amp outlet in my garage. It "filled up" at a rate of 5 mph, which means it will top off the 33 miles per day US average in just over 6 1/2 hours.
My home in the Houston metro only has 100 amp service as I have a natural gas stove, dryer, water heater, and furnace. I had an electrician install a 240V 50 amp outlet at the end of 2018 because I'd switched to a free-nights electric plan and wanted to make sure all charging was done during the free period. Even though the rate increased, by shifting EV Charging and using the delayed start feature on my washing machine and dishwasher to the free period I was able to cut my electric bill by %20.
I will caveat this by saying a 120V 15amp would not be adequate for an EV that is parked outside in the winter in northern states. From experience all of the energy ends up being used to warm up the pack, with none going towards actually charging it. I suspect it would work OK if the EV was parked in an enclosed garage, but have not been in a situation to try that myself.
I recently checked and apartments.com shows that 12.4% of the available units in Houston have access to EV chargers, which is in line with EVs being 10.5% of Q3's new vehicle sales.
I've had people give me long lectures about the un-usability of EVs while I have driven them across the city, errands, and back on purely electric power in my PHEV.
I've had family members tell me "EVs won't work in Wisconsin in the winter", yet in 2019 I'd already taken my Model 3 on a road trip from Houston to visit them in the winter.
Road trips have only gotten better since with the rollout of faster chargers, in 2019 the 250 KW V3 Superchargers started to be deployed and most of the exising 120 kW Superchargers were increased to 150 kW, and the massive expansion of the Supercharger network over the past 7 years can be seen in the maps I posted in this tweet.
A common piece of EV FUD is "the grid can't handle it if everybody switches to a EV", which ignores that it's going to be a multi-decade transition.
For the US our vehicle fleet size is about ~284K are on the road
About ~16K light vehicles are sold per year
So it would take ~18 years to transition the fleet to all EVs if 100%of new vehicles sold were EVs. However, EV sales are only~10%, and that's likely to drop next quarter due to sales being pulled forward by the end of the Federal Tax Credit, so we're probably looking at 2-3 decades for the transition.
Back in the 50s we saw the grid more than doubled in capacity in less than a decade when the widespread adoption of AC (air conditioning) occured. This video covers that.
You're welcome!
Yes, it was $35K before the tax credit, from 4:41 - 4:55 of the Edmunds video they talk about the price and show the Monroe sticker with $35,000 (not $34,999). Tesla hit the 200K sales limit of the original EV Federal Tax Credit at the end of 2018, so the tax credit for them was being phased out in 2019 - it was $3750 for the first half of 2019 and $1875 for the second half.
Yep, in Diamond Bar. I think that was the Warpstock that Timur didn't book a hotel room and ended up crashing in the extra bed in my room. I also attended Warpstock in Chicago, Toronto, and Austin. I did presentations on emulation in Toronto and Austin. Looks like Warpstock started putting the presentations online in 2002, including mine. In 2003 a friend gave me an old PowerMac G3 - over a 6 month period I switched from OS/2 to OS X, so I stopped attending Warpstock. I did have OS/2 running under Parallels on a Mac Pro for a long time, but one of the updates to Parallels broke my VMs so I switched all my VMs to VirtualBox. I bought a Mac Studio in 2023 and haven't run a VM since as none of them supported Intel operating systems as guests on Apple Silicon. Looks like Parallels does now, but warns that performance is very poor.
There's so much excess power at night that free-nights electric plans like this one are common here in Texas. When I had a free-nights plan I was able to save 20% over my prior plan by scheduling my Model 3 to charge, and my washer and dishwasher to delay-start, during the free period.
Not on the plan anymore as I've since installed solar and have my Model 3 scheduled to charge when I'm generating excess solar power - I work from home so this works well for me.
7:12 in this video covers how the grid capacity more than doubled over the course of a decade to accommodate the increased electrical demand from the mass adoption of air conditioning in homes:
though Tesla made it difficult to buy:
As late as 2020, devoted Tesla fans could still finagle their way behind the wheel of a $35,000 Model 3 if they were willing to parse a labyrinthine ordering process. They were forced to build a more expensive version of the car using its online configurator (the Model 3 Standard Range Plus, which then retailed for about $40,000), bail out at the paperwork step, and then call the company directly to have the order altered to a Standard Range model.
Edmunds bought one and made a video about it in early 2020:
Tesla Model 3: What Do You Really Get for the $35K Price?
As an aside, your username brought back fond memories of my OS/2 days - we even met at Warpstock 97. I used to use your DSMI/2 plug-in to play back MOD files on my GeoCities site that hosted my emulator ports for OS/2, such as ColEm/2 a ColecoVision emulator. Here's an archive of my ColEm/2 page from Wayback Machine. At the bottom is a "DSMI/2 Enhanced" GIF (may have to reload the page to get it to show up) links to a cached copy of your DSMI plug-in page.
The Nuclear plant south of me (Houston metro) lost half its output during the '21 grid failure
How and why a nuclear reactor shut down in Texas cold snap when energy was needed most
The shutdown of a nuclear reactor in Texas has contributed to the state’s power shortage crisis caused by extreme cold weather.
One of two reactors shut down at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station an hour southwest of Houston, knocking out about half of its 2,700 megawatts of generating capacity.
I just checked Amazon for USB C headphones. After sorting by price Low to High the cheapest was $3.49, and the price for non-sponsored headphones does not exceed $7.95 for the first 10 pages.
The first set is on sale for $3.49, normally $6.99.
The next set for $3.99 is not on sale.
Last non-sponsored set on page 10 is $7.95.
Understanding Lithium Battery Charge Cycles: A Complete Guide
A charge cycle refers to the process of discharging a battery and then recharging it back to full capacity. Technically, a complete charge cycle occurs when a battery has discharged to a certain percentage—commonly 100%—and is then charged back to its full capacity. However, it’s important to note that a charge cycle can consist of smaller partial discharges. For instance, if you use 50% of your battery one day and recharge it to full, then use 50% the next day and recharge again, that still counts as one full charge cycle.
So a charge from 0-100% is 1 charge, charging four times from 75%-100% is also 1 charge, and charging ten times from 90%-100% is also 1 charge.
Do note that some lithium batteries do not like to sit with a 100% charge for a long period of time, such as for my Model 3 the suggested daily charge limit is 80%. If I charged it five times from 60%-80% that would be counted as 1 cycle. On a trip it's OK to charge to 100%, just want to hit the road soon after reaching 100%.
Natural gas is still our biggest source of electricity* and heat in Texas, and it's production dropped nearly in half during the freeze:
Regional natural gas production (January 2020-February 2021)
A large portion of the decrease in natural gas production was from declines in Texas, which fell over 10 Bcf/d during the February 8–17 period. Unlike natural gas production infrastructure in northern areas of the country where below-freezing temperatures are more common and infrastructure is generally winterized, wellheads, gathering lines, and even processing facilities in Texas are more susceptible to freeze-offs during periods of extremely cold weather.
The nuclear plant south of me lost half its output:
How and why a nuclear reactor shut down in Texas cold snap when energy was needed most
One of two reactors shut down at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station an hour southwest of Houston, knocking out about half of its 2,700 megawatts of generating capacity.
Interestingly enough, even with all the frozen turbines wind was generating more power than expected when the grid collapsed:
Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold
Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast. [see chart, green line is what was generated, blue and red lines below it are what was forecasted]
...
An ERCOT director told Bloomberg that problems were widespread across generating sources, including coal, natural gas, and even nuclear plants.
My understanding is it was windier at the coast than expected and those turbines more than compensated for the frozen inland turbines.
* from ERCOT's Fuel Mix report for 2024
- 35% Gas-CC
- 24% Wind
- 13% Coal
- 10% Solar
- 9% Gas (not CC)
- 8% Nuclear
- 1% other
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." -- John Wooden
