Hi gang. It was great meeting you all at Gathering #1. I learned a lot and enjoyed sharing what I knew. I am not yet sure whether I can make Gathering #2 on Oct 16, but I will be there if I can. It will be fun to compare notes after our test drives.
I have one new bit to share. When I first told a friend of mine, who is a professor of chemistry, that I was getting a Leaf, he asked me, "How much of the electricity that you would use for charging is coming from coal, and therefore has a higher carbon footprint than gasoline ?" This seemed to be a reasonable question, so I researched it for SCE. In case one or more of you are confronted with this question, here is what I found.
7% of the power SCE actually delivered, as opposed to generator capacity, came from coal in 2007. Natural gas is their biggest source, and it has a much lower carbon footprint than gasoline. SCE shutdown their Laughlin coal plant end of 2005. Renewable power has risen from 16% in 2007 to 17% in 2009. Wind has gone up but biomass has gone down. Compared to other utilities in the US, this is really quite good. I believe I saw where electricity in Indiana is something like 90% coal-derived.
It gets better. We will be charging our cars at night, when the grid is lightly loaded. It happens that wind generation in California peaks during the night, as can be seen here:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
Wind generation is still a small fraction of the total, but it is a growing fraction, and for a long time there should be more power produced by wind than consumed by electric vehicles. So we can argue that our cars our powered by the wind! In Germany, they actually have more wind generation at night than they can use.
Now for those of you in DWP territory, the story is not quite as good. Up until recently they were buying almost 50% of their power from out-of-state coal generation plants. That is how they were keeping their rates low. As a municipal utility, they had exemption from the California mandate that applied to SCE, a private utility. However, I understand that DWP is now promising to reduce its dependence on coal, but I don't have figures.
Have fun at the next gathering and take a picture!
