Sunrise Applies Heat to ODOT

The Oregon Transportation Commission held a meeting on July 15th. One of the items on the agenda was i205 improvements and expansion of 7 miles from West Linn to Oregon City including the Willamette River crossing. This work would add a third lane in each direction and reinforce the Abernethy Bridge and the eight other i205 bridges in the project area to be able to withstand a major earthquake.

The commission says the project will make the section of i205 "safer and allow more reliable travel to access work and critical services, even after an earthquake or other major disaster as well as address congestion."

This meeting included a public comment section. Several members of The Sunrise Movement made their voices heard.

From their website: The Sunrise Movement is a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. We’re building an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.

The Sunrise members brought up several points:

1. Expanding freeways increases traffic and does not reduce congestion (citing the Katy freeway in Huston with 26 lanes and yet it still has congestion)
2. 40% of Oregon's emissions are from transportation
3. Dollars spent on freeways are not available public transit (give people an option other than sitting in their car on a congested freeway)  

This commission meeting and testimony came right after Oregon's "once in a millennium" heatwave. At least 54 people died because of this global warming amplified heatwave. Other estimates put the number of deaths over 100. So there was a sense of urgency to do something to reverse this "global weirding" trend.

The Sunrise Movement is youth-led and one of the more galvanic testimonies came from a 15-year old that started by scolding the commission, saying that she should not have to wake up at 7AM to tell a bunch of adults things that they should already know. This same testimony ended by asking the commission how many people have to die before they take the climate crisis seriously. 

The commission handled this compelling and emotional testimony very professionally. 

So what do we do? What would you do? i205 is a primary path for goods moving up and down the west coast. I-5 runs through downtown Portland, so 205 is the bypass for freight heading north and south. This freight is typically on diesel semi-trucks. I don't want them stuck in traffic, polluting. Are the lanes the problem or the tailpipes of the vehicles that utilize them? If you allow this expansion, is it just one more slice in a death of 1000 cuts? 

The expansion takes this portion of 205 from 2 lanes to 3. This is far from the 26 lanes of the Katy freeway. Most of 205 is already 3 lanes, so it is not surprising that this stretch, where it's choked down to 2 lanes is a bottleneck. I think each action must be considered and, where reasonable, allowed. 

For me, I go back to the three ways to change the world. 

1.  Pass laws to change/control behavior 
2.  Set an example that some might follow 
3.  Invent a better way that people will rush towards

Generally, I lean toward option three. I see electrified transportation as the better option. People want freedom of movement. People want things delivered to their houses. That means that we need freeways, highways, and roads that are kept up and maintained and yes, in some cases, expanded. I'd like to see a multimodal transit center and charging infrastructure added as part of the improvement plan. These would allow more public transportation options and electric vehicle charging. I wouldn't even mind seeing a few more tunnels to give people another option for personal transportation.

You can listen to the complete testimony (and the EV infrastructure presentation that immediately followed it) here.

Let me know what you think.

Portland VPP Supporting The Grid During Heatwave

Portland is having *another* heatwave. And our local utility, Portland General, is dispatching our Virtual Power Plant (VPP) to help alleviate the grid strain that the additional air conditioner usage will cause. 

As I pointed out during the last time the VPP was dispatched, in our situation, this dispatch operation can actually increase our grid load. That's because we are load-shifting and reducing our electricity bill. 

The VPP control software will improve. Next summer, they'll likely be able to account for our use case. In the meantime, our minor increase in load will be more than made up for by others in the VPP. 

Alternatively, I might disable the VPP temporarily to stay "islanded" so that we don't increase our grid load. After all, I volunteered our batteries to help the grid, not increase the burden on it.

It Takes Talent - How Tesla is different #95

Most companies advertise their products. Outside of a college recruiting event, most companies don't advertise much if at all to attract talent.

The small amount of advertising that Tesla has done, has primarily been to recruit talent, rather than to sell their products. This is true at Tesla's "Day" events (Battery Day, AI Day...) as well as in their social media. This philosophy extends into other Musk-run companies too. The Neurolink Launch Event did demo the product but they spent an equal amount of time talking about the roles in the company and how they need to hire animal caretakers, programmers, chip designers, signal integrity engineers...

One recent interesting example of Tesla "advertising for talent" was a video that starred Tesla's chief vehicle designer, Franz Von Hausen. The video looks more like a cyberpunk video game than real life. It starts with Franz spraypainting Chinese characters on a wall. Someone hands him a tablet, as the glow from the tablet illuminates his face, you can see that he is both impressed and intrigued by the design. He asks, "Who did this?" as the caption asks, "What will you design?" 

Certainly an enticing thought. If you are a designer, you'd want to work at a company that's trying new things, this might catch your attention. The Cybertruck is featured prominently in the ad as an example of something that likely would have never been attempted at another company. 

Tesla plans to design an affordable car for the worldwide market in the Chinese design center that they are beginning to staff with this ad. 

The specifics of this effort are part of the bigger picture. Tesla knows that to achieve things that have never been done before, you have to hire talented designers and engineers. You have to hire people that are going to push things too far (in a controlled environment), see where they break, learn from that, and use that knowledge to make something that not just a derivative product, but a disruption.

100,000 kWh!

We installed our first solar photovoltaic (PV) system in November of 2007. We used a local PV installer company called Mr. Sun Solar. Other than a few down days when an inverter needed to be replaced, the system has been in operation for 4975 days. In 2015, we added a second PV system to our home. This time we used SolarCity (now Tesla). 

In the 8 years from 2007 to 2015, solar costs had dropped significantly and PV efficiency had improved. Meaning that our 2015 system was twice the size at half the cost of our older system.

Today, these two systems have each generated about 50 MWh; collectively generating just over 100,000 kWh (100 MWh) from the sunlight hitting our roof.

Solar energy production on our roof

Looking at the above chart, you can see that, despite the older system having an eight-year headstart, each system has generated ~50 MWh. The smaller system took 13 and a half years to reach this milestone. Whereas the larger PV system arrived in just 5 years, 10 months. I been watching for this crossover point, where the larger system would eclipse the smaller one, but I didn't know it would happen so close to this major milestone of production.

How Much Is 100MWh? 

Okay, we've made 100MWh, but how much energy is that? Let's look at it a few different ways.

The average US home uses 10,399 kWh annually. This means that our 100 MWh could power the average home for 9.6 years. 

The 2020 Tesla Model 3 SR+ is a highly efficient EV with a 239 Wh/mile consumption rate. At that rate, 100 MWh could propel this vehicle for more than 400,000 miles; enough to drive around the planet 16 times.

Looking at it one more way, the EPA says that a gallon of gasoline has 33.7 kWh of energy. This means that our 100 MWh is equivalent to nearly 3000 gallons of gas (however, with zero emissions from our solar).

From 2015 to today, solar's price has continued to drop. If you want solar on your home, you can use our referral code.

The Reason The Boring Co Will Win (That No One Understands)

The Boring Company recently unveiled the Las Vegas Loop. Riders will use an app and select their destination. The app will direct them to a stall number and car; riders pile in and they are whisked off to their destination.

Currently, the cars are human-piloted and only driving at a max of 35 MPH. This, of course, was trumpeted by the Musk detractors. The criticism goes something like this: A car can only hold a few people; a train would hold many more. So, they conclude, tracks should be installed and this should be changed to a tried-and-true subway like so many other cities. This superficial deduction concludes that cars in tunnels is a flop and that trains would work much better.

I find this train-thinking to be stuck in the 1900s. You might even say, they have "tunnel-vision." I'll explain.

Centralized vs Decentralized

Long ago, my day job was as a network engineer. I worked at a company developing network infrastructure products. We analyzed traffic flows (network packets) and methods to reduce latency and optimize throughput. We had contracts with NASA, The Olympics, most of the hyperscaler datacenters, and most of the server OEMs. The network traffic analysis I did there was not the same as automobile traffic, but there were some important lessons. When I started Token Ring was the cash cow, but things changed quickly.

Token Ring

This type of network is not all that different from a train route. Without going into the technology, nodes on this type of network are logically organized into rings. A circulating token controls access. This is not all that different from a train going around a loop, you can only get on the network/tracks when the train/token arrives. The nodes in this type of network are even called stations. This type of network eventually failed because it was not scaleable. As more nodes were added to the network, the effective throughput of any given station slowed. 

Ethernet (Half Duplex)

The technology that succeeded Token Ring was half-duplex Ethernet. This type of network allowed many more stations to be added to the network without choking throughput (with caveats). During those half-duplex days, networks had limited uses. On half-duplex networks, all of the nodes share a common communications media called the bus. Half-duplex networks function well when there are just a few, short-lived, traffic flows; which is why they worked well back then when most network traffic was periodic client-server activity (like fetching email or printing a document). However, as network communication became more essential with the rise of the internet and streaming, this type of common bus network collapsed under the pressure. Half-duplex is like a walkie-talkie network with everyone on the same channel. You can have as many people as you want on that channel as long as most people are just listening most of the time; however, as soon as everyone wants to start talking frequently, you just have a jammed-up unusable channel. 

Switched Ethernet

We've looked at two network types (Token Ring and half-duplex Ethernet) that didn't scale (albeit for different reasons). Switched Ethernet will be our third and final network technology. Both of the previous network technologies had a centralized control (the ring or the bus). 

Switched (full-duplex) Ethernet quickly replaced half-duplex Ethernet. With switched Ethernet, there was no bus, no shared walkie-talkie channel, every node has its own dedicated channel. When node A is talking to node B the traffic flows from A to B. If C and D are on the same network, the conversation between A and B generally does not interfere with the traffic between C and D. This is the technology that is used today in everything from your home network to massive datacenters around the world. It is far more scalable and has much less congestion.  

If switched networking is so great, why didn't we just start here? The idea of switched networks has been around since the 1960s. The problem was the technology. At the heart of a packet-switched network is a switch that must look at every packet that comes in, determine the packet's destination, and then send it out of the switch via the exact right port for that destination. Multiply this by every port on the switch that is both and sending and receiving and you have a complex forwarding table that has to dynamically update. Then grow the network by layering (attaching switches to other switches), and things (path discovery, forwarding tables...) get very complicated. The switches that allow this type of network to be possible have to be very advanced.

During the era of Token Ring and half-duplex, these full-duplex switches would have been prohibitively expensive (if even technically possible); whereas today, you buy a low-end one for less than $10.

Comparing Network Topologies to People Mover Topologies

So let's tie this back to the topic at hand, The Boring Company Loop system. 

Token Ring is like the train or subway. It has a fixed route; as more stops are added, more people can access it, but each stop lowers the overall speed. More throughput means more latency (longer travel time).

Half-duplex is like a bus. If you charter a bus and your whole party is going to the same place, it works great. But if you have a bunch of people boarding, all with different agendas, things fall apart quickly.  

The Boring Company's Loop design is a switched network. Riders select their destination and are assigned a dedicated car. That car goes to their selected destination directly. They don't stop at all the points in between to allow people in and out of the car. The Loop system computes the most effective route for your car to your destination. There's no stopping along the way.

The Boring Company's topology allows new routes and stations to be added to the network without adding interim stations at which all passengers must stop even when this is not their destination. 

Loop is a scalable transportation network. And it will get faster. 

Scaling

Switched Ethernet started out at a speed of 10 megabits per second (Mbps). This grew to 100 Mbps, then 1000 Mbps or 1 gigabits per second (1 Gbps), then 10 Gbps, 100 Gbps, and now 800 Gbps is under development. I'm not saying that the vehicles in these tunnels will be 80 thousand times faster than their current 35 MPH speed, but they can get 3 or 4 times faster in long straightaways. To be fair, even at 35 MPH, this is far faster than city street traffic. With the stop and go of traffic lights and congestion, city traffic averages about 14 MPH door to door. So even the initial Loop speed is more than twice the speed a taxi / ride-share could offer (although with more limited destination options). 

Today, the cars in the narrow Loop tunnels are piloted by humans. This will change soon. Solving autonomous driving in this controlled environment will be far easier than solving it in city street driving. As regular readers know, our prediction is that Level 5 driving will not be solved until 2027. These tunnels, on the other hand, are the best case for self-driving cars. They don't have to deal with rain, snow, sun directly in the lens, cross-traffic... This Level 4 solution could launch as soon as next year. 

Scale-out vs Scale-up - How TBC Wins

Trains scale by going faster, adding more train cars, and/or more stations/stops. This is scaling up. There are limits to increasing the speed and limits to adding more cars. As the number of stations increases, it increases capacity and access at the expense of increasing the average travel time for everyone using the platform. Scaling up trains quickly hits real physical limits.

The Boring Company scales by adding more destinations, more tunnels, and more cars. This is scaling out and it allows for more parallel operation. It means that stations, routes, and cars can be added to increase capacity without impacting the throughput or latency of the existing routes. It also means that popular stops can increase capacity by adding more ingress/egress tunnels to/from that station, thereby forming superstations. Alternatively, popular locations could have multiple standard-sized stations (e.g., Convention Center North Station and Convention Center South Station). This is easy to do with the Loop system since additional stations don't burden the system. More capacity, means more stations, more tunnels, more route options, resulting in a better overall system.

With trains, more capacity decreases performance; whereas, with Loop, more capacity improves performance. This is the fundamental difference.

Scalability Adds Flexibility

If you add a stop on a train route that has low utilization, then you've slowed down everyone for the benefit of a few, if any, passengers. Similarly, if you add a bus stop in an out-of-the-way place, you add cost for the bus to periodically drive past this location, even if no one is getting on or off the bus. 

This is different with Loop. All rides are point to point. If a hotel or casino that has low traffic pays for a station, then the network has grown and no one has been slowed down and there is no on-going fuel cost to drive to this out-of-the-way low-utilization location unless it is actually needed. 

I've avoided diving into the network analysis (graph theory) math for this article; instead, trying to articulate the common sense case. If you view each station as a vertex and each tunnel as an edge, there's a vast amount of analysis that can be done to understand the traffic flow within the system. The Boring Company will know every ride that occurs within the system. They'll be able to use graph theory and congestion information to determine the best paths for vehicles to take and which areas need additional capacity. 

If you have n number of stations, the possible number of station-to-station connections is n * (n-1). They'll be able to use historical information to determine the best path for each new tunnel that they add to the network. According to the Vegas Unzipped image above, there are 17 stations currently planned for the Vegas Loop. That's a possible 272 tunnels that could be dug for full-mesh connectivity. This would, of course, be overkill at the start of the system, but it demonstrates their ability to scale capacity as needed.

The Time Is Right

If this is clearly the best method for public transportation, why hasn't it always worked this way? The first answer is the same as it was for Switched Ethernet: technology. Imagine if everyone that got on a train told the engineer where they wanted to go and then the route was computed and the tracks were switched in real-time. That wouldn't have been possible with last century technology. Today, however, route planning is trivial. 

The second technology that makes this the right time is EVs. When a tunnel is designed exclusively for EVs, it doesn't need an elaborate ventilation system. This allows the tunnels to be smaller (therefore cheaper and faster to dig). The other reason that EVs tech is ready is range. Tesla's EVs will have all the range they need for a full day's service. And they have the performance to whisk you at speed quickly to your destination.

Our third item on this "this is the right time" list is Apps. Today, nearly everyone has a smartphone, with the LV Loop app, you'll be able to schedule your ride and pay on your own phone. The route will be calculated before you even click your seatbelt. There's no need to queue up to buy tickets... this is just another way that Loop systems will allow parallel operation.

Conclusion

Loop is in its beta phase, it will improve greatly over the next few years. As it matures, it will become the most efficient public transportation system humanity has ever built. This is not simply because it uses electric vehicles, it's because they have a significant technological advantage over the competing legacy technologies.

This is the same formula that other Musk Co. endeavors use. SpaceX's reusable rockets have a massive cost advantage over "disposable" rocket companies. Tesla's electric cars have a massive efficiency and performance advantage over their fossil-burning competition. 

The Boring Co. has "packetized" transportation and made a scalable "switched" network. This gives them a technological advantage over their last-century-based train competition. 

If you want an incredible transportation system, it's time to change from tunnel-vision to visions of tunnels.

Heat Impact on Solar Production

In my last post, I quipped that our solar energy production dipped because of the recent high temperatures. Thinking more about this, I decided that I had only looked at a couple of days. This is one of the most common human fallacies. I had an idea, I looked for confirming data, found some, and assumed that means I was correct.

You overcome this, not by trying to prove yourself right, but by looking for credible data to prove youself wrong. Well, it didn't take long. 

Day	Fri	Sat	Sun	Mon	Tues
Temp (F)	93°	108°	111°	115°	91°
Solar (kWh)	75.1	50.5	73.5	49.4	75.2

Looking at the table, if you compare Friday and Saturday, it sure seems like the increased temp resulted in lower solar production. Saturday was 15°F hotter and it had ~25kWh lower output. 

Comparing Monday and Tuesday is a similar story. Monday was 24°F hotter and had about 25kWh lower output. 

Problem solved right? Nope. Sunday shatters this correlation. Sunday was hotter than Saturday but had solar production closer to the cooler Friday and Tuesday. Perhaps I was too quick to blame the production fluctuation on heat. 

It is well known that heat can impact solar efficiency, but the impact is not as significant as I thought. Each brand/model of solar panels is a little different, but they all publish the heat impact by listing the efficiency impact for each degree Celsius above 25°C. One reasonable example is negative 0.258% per degree C. So going from 93F to 108F is about a 7°C change. This would be about a 2% efficiency change. This alone does not account for the ~30% decrease from Friday to Saturday. Clearly, something else is happening too. 

Looking at weatherunderground and other sites, these days went from "passing clouds", to "clear", to "sunny." Meaning that, despite all of them being hot, hot days, they had varying levels of cloud coverage. Sunday had the least cloud coverage and solar production remained high later into the evening (8PM) than other days.

So there you have it, the variance can primarily be blamed on clouds, not the heat.

120 Hours of AC - Excessive Energy Usage

The heatwave hitting the Pacific North West seems to have finally broken. This event set new record highs for many locations in the region. British Columbia set a new record for the entire country of Canada.

Some have called this event a "once-in-a-millennium" occurrence. This would likely true if we had a stable environment, but we've added a lot of energy into the climate system and, in a perturbed system, you see many unexpected results. We've entered into an era of "global weirding." 

Roads Buckling in Heatwave - via @wsdot_north

Several roads in the region buckled and cracked due to thermal expansion. The trolley cars of Portland had to shut down due to damage to the high power cables. Similarly, the light rail passenger train, MAX, shut down due to cable expansion and sagging. Much of Oregon has had drought conditions for the last three years. Then, compounding the problem, it was hit with temperatures higher than any that have ever been recorded in the area.  

For our little home, we had a few little challenges, but overall we were rather lucky. Some of our neighbors lost power for a few hours. This is not surprising given the load that all the additional air conditioner use caused. However, these outages were in small areas and short-lived. The Western Interconnect grid held up to this stress test far better than the Texas grid has held up to their recent hot weather. Kudos to everyone in the region that helps keep the lights on (and the AC running when we needed it most). 

Speaking of AC, our AC unit is sized for a typical Oregon summer. It is, however,  significantly undersized for extreme heat like this. Even with our AC running all-out, the temperature in our home slowly continued to increase throughout the day. As I write this the AC has been running for 120 hours, non-stop. And it looks like it will be running for at least another 10 hours. The higher highs this heatwave brought were bad, but the higher overnight lows were worse; they meant no relief overnight either. On a typical hot summer day, the AC will run about 16 hours, not for days straight.

Portland weather graph via timeanddate.com

We (and much of the region) are going to have a big power bill this month. Compounding the energy problem is that despite all the sunshine, our solar energy production was reduced. Solar panels have a preferred operating temperature; when they get too hot, their efficiency is reduced. For example on June 28th (one of the hotter days), we generated 49.4kWh. On a more typical summer day, we typically generate ~80kWh. This is a notable reduction in output at a time when we most needed it. Just another reason that you should oversize your solar PV system whenever you can (even if it results in some solar clipping on good days).

Have a great summer and stay cool!

Virtual Power Plant Performs Suboptimally During A Heatwave

UPDATE (6/27/2021): Title updated for accuracy. Details at the end.*

We had our first real virtual power plant (VPP) event and it didn't go as intended. 

The point of a pilot project is to "learn by doing" on a small scale. Lessons learned on a small scale can prevent problems in a bigger program later; so, from that perspective, this was a victory. 

Before getting too much further into this, I should explain what happened. 

On June 21st, one of the longest days of the year, we were having a heatwave here in the Northwest. In response, Portland General Electric decided to put its new VPP into action. Our batteries would be discharged to help offset the expected increase in air conditioner use. Perfect, this is why we signed up. If this helps the utility avoid using diesel generators and peaker plants, that's great.**

On the surface, this seems like a great plan. At 5PM PGE is going to take over the battery's operation. BUT two hours before, at 3PM, peak time starts. Our battery is configured to discharge during peak hours and remove our home's load from the grid. So at 3PM, the battery responds as expected and our home is off-grid (sometimes referred to as islanding). Actually, our home is better than off-grid. The battery is running our house and the solar panels are feeding the grid. 

Then at 5PM, PGE takes over operation of the battery. Up until this point, the battery had been discharging at a rate of about 7 to 10kW (adjusting up and down with our home's needs). When PGE took over, they had the battery discharging at a steady 2kW (see graph below).

Home Energy Flow: (grey is the grid, green is Powerwall, yellow is solar)

This was 5 to 8kW lower than it had been discharging. This increased the grid load, exactly the opposite of the intention of the program.

Looking at the graph, you can see that after ~9AM, when the battery was full, our home became a negative grid load. Our solar panels generated enough to run our home, air conditioning and all. In the times the AC cycled off, we were feeding the grid. Then starting at 3PM our battery took over and we continued to be a negative load. It was not until PGE took over at 5PM that we started to use energy from the grid and add to the demand. 

If our battery had been in standby/backup mode, just sitting at 100% charged up, waiting for an outage, then this VPP plan would have worked fine. However, that was not the case. 

The SmartBattery program needs to add another level of "smarts". For example, setting up the battery to discharge at least 2kW, that would have worked better. Alternatively, they could have requested that the battery discharge 2kW more than the home required, thereby guaranteeing some level of feed-in. Perhaps the simplest option would have been to have the battery discharge at a higher level, e.g., 8kW. This is well within the 15kW that our system can sustainably supply. 

It may be that such modes are not possible with the APIs available to VPP operators. Requesting 8kW works fine for our system, but if an owner only has a single Powerwall, 8kW is not an option. The VPP does not currently customize the request for each home. Tesla Powerwalls are not the only home battery system in the mix, so they may need to adhere to a lowest common denominator mode... 

It could be, that the net result was still positive, just sub-optimal. For example, say there are 500 homes in this pilot. 50 are in a state similar to mine. Each added an average of 4kW of load to the grid for a total of 200kW more load. The other 450 homes, however, added 900kW of relief to the grid. This means that the VPP added 700kW of net relief to the grid. Still a net gain, but not as good as adding 900kW or more grid relief.

It looks like it is going to be a hot one this summer, so you can expect that this will not be the last VPP call-to-arms. Perhaps they will make some improvements before the next event.

Ω

* UPDATE1: The initial title was "VPP Fails During A Heatwave". As I explained in the article, the VPP didn't perform as intended at my house, but that does not mean that the VPP as a whole failed. Some readers, rightfully so, called me out on this clickbait characterization and I've updated the title to be more accurate and less clickbaity. One other minor update: the original article referred to June 21st as solstice. June 21st is often the solstice, but this year, in N. America, the solstice occurred on June 20th.

** Sidebar1: Global warming is causing hotter summers, which increases energy demands, which (when energy is sourced from fossil fuels) increases emissions, which increases global warming... This feedback cycle can/must be broken. Summertime is when the sun shines and solar energy production scales well with AC usage. Combine this with just a few hours of energy storage and you can time-shift loads as needed to stabilize grid demand. 

Tesla Charging On The Road

Summer is right around the corner. That means road trips! After a year with little to no travel, it will be nice to stretch out on the open road. 

If, like me, you drive a Tesla. You have a long-range EV with access to a vast Supercharger network. And you have access to (the less discussed) destination charging network at restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. In addition to all of this, Tesla has adapters that allow you to charge up at CHAdeMO stations like the West Coast Electric Highway. There's even a CCS adapter (coming soon to N. America) that will allow your Tesla to charge up on the Electrify America network.

If you find yourself so far off the beaten path that none of these will work for you, you still have an option, guerilla charging.  

Guerilla Charging: what it is and what it's not

When you have wandered off into an area devoid of charging stations, you may need to charge up at a campground or from a friend's dryer outlet. When that's the case, you have just stepped into the guerilla charging zone. 

Before we get into the details, I want to clarify that by guerilla charging, I mean being resourceful and having the equipment to get the job done. I don't mean stealing electricity or cutting locks to gain access. If you'd like to charge up on someone's property, just ask; explain how much electricity you'll use and offer to pay for it. "I'll be using about 60 cents worth of electricity per hour and I'll be here for ~90 minutes. I'll gladly pay you for it and you can have a soda from my cooler if you'd like one."

You should know that charging from a 240V outlet is a lot slower than charging at a Supercharger, so plan to spend some time there: bring a book, go for a hike, make some new friends, or catch up on some sleep, there are lots of options. 

Tesla Gear You'll Need

Your Tesla came with a mobile charging connector (MCC). Older versions of the MCC included an RV outlet (NEMA 14-50) and a standard US home outlet adapter (NEMA 15-5), the current version of the MCC only includes the 15-5 adapter. This standard US household outlet is the slowest of all the options at 2-4 miles per hour, it is really only useful for overnight/multiday charging. So if your MCC didn't include the 14-50 RV outlet adapter, you'll need to buy one from Tesla here. 

Adapters You'll Need

Now that you have a 14-50 on the end of your portable Tesla charging connector, you'll need adapters to be able to plug it into the sea of 240V plugs that are out there. It might seem like 240V is 240V and one plug should be enough; if only it were that easy. There are 240V plugs for dryers 1994 and prior, 1995 - 2011, and 2012+, there are welder plugs, range plugs, twist locks, 2-pole 3-wire, 3-pole 4-wire... a dizzying array. The below chart summarizes the most common 240V outlets nicely. 

The good thing is that nearly all of them are a subset of the 14-50 so with an adapter, you can plug into them. When you are shopping for adapters, you want to get high-quality parts with the right gauge of wire and molded (rain-tight) connectors. You could be charging for hours and low-quality part could get hot and slow down your charge rate (or worse). 

I found adapters at the AC Works Store on Amazon that appears perfectly suited for Tesla use cases. 

They have locking adapters, air conditioner adapters, welding adapters, marina adapters, and more. 

If you will be charging at campgrounds, one of the most important adapters to have is the TT-30 to Tesla adapter. There are other TT-30 to 14-50 adapters but they do not all work with EV charging equipment. The TT-30 adapter at your local RV shop will not likely work for a Tesla (or any other EV). So make sure to one that specifically says that it is made for EV (or Tesla) charging (like the one from the AC Works Store). 

Prepare Before You Go

I made an adapter kit, I bought a bright orange backpack and filled it with various adapters. This lives in the frunk of my Tesla and I find it reassuring to know that I can plug into nearly any outlet on this continent. You might not want to go that far, but you might want to at least have at least two (14-50, the TT-30), as well as an adapter for that weird outlet in your father-in-law's garage.

Remember that you don't necessarily need to charge to 100% on these charging stops. Use the Lagom method; charge so you can safely make it to your next destination.

Disclosures: 
This article contains affiliate links 
I am long Tesla

Portland Virtual Power Plant

Portland General Electric is starting a virtual power plant pilot program and we've signed up for it. 

 A Virtual Power Plant is like Energy in the Cloud ☺

What is a Virtual Power Plant (VPP)? 

A VPP allows your electric utility to utilize residential energy storage systems to balance the grid energy needs. You may also see this referred to as utilizing "behind the meter assets." 

If you have a Tesla Powerwall (or another home battery system), normally, that battery in your garage or on the side of your home is only going to respond to your home's demands. Unlike solar, home batteries are usually not allowed to feed energy into the grid. A VPP frees your battery from this restriction and allows it to respond to the grid's needs too. A VPP can be used to reduce or eliminate spinning reserves or peaker plants. 

VPP Example

Say it's a hot day in August at 6PM. People arrive home and turn on their air conditioners (AC), fans, and start cooking diner. This places a big demand on the grid. Let's say that you have solar and home batteries. For round numbers, let's say your solar is generating 4kW, your home is using 2kW, and your batteries are full. The extra 2kW that your solar is generating helps the grid by effectively carrying the load of one additional home in your neighborhood. This is good, but not great since the Powerwalls are not being used in this first example.

Now, let's say it is peak price time and you are on a time-of-use plan. In this situation, your home battery would be discharging to carry your home's load. This allows the full 4kW from the solar panels to feed into the grid. This would mean that your solar would be carrying the load of 2 of your neighbors. This is better than the first example, but we can do even better. 

A VPP allows the utility to dispatch your batteries for more than just your home's needs. So on this hot day, when the grid is burdened, rather than firing up a peaker plant, the utility sends a dispatch message to your batteries (and hundreds of others) to ask them to start discharging near their sustainable rate. Let's say you have 2 Powerwalls and they can continuously discharge at a rate of 10kW. Now along with the solar, you are sending 12kW of power into the grid. This is enough to run 6 homes on your block.

Scenario	Solar Production	Powerwall  Output	Grid Feed-In	Homes Supported
Solar Only  (or Powerwall in Backup Only mode)	4kW	0	2kW	1
Powerwall with TOU	4kW	2kW	4kW	2
Powerwall with VPP	4kW	10kW	12kW	6

This example is for just one home. A virtual power plant could have hundreds or thousands of homes participating and if each of them can ease the grid of the burden of 4 to 10 other homes, then you start to see why the utilities are interested in this idea. 

How Much Of The Battery Capacity Can They Use?

You get to define the 'Power Outage Reserve.' This means you can keep whatever percentage of the battery you'd like for your own peace of mind. In the winter (when outages are more likely here), I keep the reserve at 60%. In the summer, I lower it down to 30%. Even if we have an outage during the summer, we have more energy coming from the solar panels, so I'm not worried about keeping the batteries too full. 

What's In It For Me?

Okay, this helps the grid, but it will cause extra cycling wear and tear on my battery and if there is a power outage, my battery might be lower than it would have otherwise been. Utilities don't expect you to do this out of kindness, there are incentives for participation.

VPP programs have various incentives and payments for the people that participate. Some give you several thousands of dollars of incentives to install home batteries, others even give you the batteries for free. Some pay you for every month that you are in the program, others pay you per event or per kWh.

The PGE program that I'm enrolling in will pay participants $20 per month if they have solar. Ironically, if you DON'T have solar, you get paid $40 per month. You are paid more because the utility can also charge your battery at their discretion when they have surplus power available. When you have solar, the rules are generally written such that you can only charge home energy batteries with solar. 

If you are participating in the Energy Trust of Oregon's Solar Within Reach program, you may be eligible for an instant $5,000 rebate in addition to the above monthly $20. 

If you are within one of PGE's 3 Smart Grid Test Bed areas and you are one of the first 200 to sign up, you may be eligible for an instant rebate of up to $3,000 in addition to the above monthly participation funds.

How Big Is The PGE VPP?

This is a 5-year pilot program with up to 525 homes and up to 4 megawatts of dispatchable power. That's an average of ~7.6kW from each home. Our 3 Powerwalls can provide about twice that much. I guess they expect the average participant to only have 1 or 2 Powerwalls or (more likely) they will not be using the system's full potential. 

Which Home Energy Storage Battery Brands Are Supported? 

The PGE VPP currently supports home battery systems from Generac, SolarEdge, Sonnen, Sunverge, and Tesla.

If you want Tesla Powerwalls and/or Solar, you can use my referral link.

If you want to sign up for PGE's VPP pilot, here's the link. 

Disclosure: 

I'm Long Tesla