University Place

>> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Wisconsin Public Television, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you again Bruce Johnson. He's been here several times before. He was raised in Utica, New York, along the Erie Canal, lived in New Hampshire, graduated from Boston University, has been in TV production as a videographer, editor, director for 33 years. He's lived here in Madison for 27.5 years, and he is, by his own definition, a solar farmer. That means if you drive by his house, you'll see on the top of his roof all kinds of really cool photovoltaic cells. You'll see in his driveway an electric vehicle. If you go turn on the tap in his house, it's going to be hot water heated with photons. I think this is pretty cool stuff. The landscape for solar farming, the landscape for locally produced electricity is changing. That's why I'm looking forward to hearing what Bruce has to say tonight as he gives his talk on insights from a conflicted solar farmer. Please join me in welcoming Bruce Johnson back to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

APPLAUSE

>> Hi, everybody. If you've ever seen any of my other lectures, you'll know that I always start out with the same disclaimer. I know I speak fast. I know I mumble. These are not surprises to me. If there's a problem with this, please feel free to let me know, and I will slow down and go backwards if I have to. Tom, in the weeks coming up to this lecture, kept calling me a citizen scientist, and I thought that's a really interesting phrase. But before we get there, I'll give you a little background on me. Tom did a little bit of it. I was a kid in upstate New York. I did junior high there. I went to high school in New Hampshire. I went to Boston University. Pretty good ride there. Great hockey team at the time, by the way. I worked in television for 33 years, more than 33 years now. It's a lot of fun for somebody who's a geek because as much as the landscape for solar has changed, the landscape for television in that 33 years has changed entirely as well. For somebody who knows anything about computers, it's a really good place to be. I was an early adapter of home computers. I had my first home computer in 1984. Had my first modem in 1985. That was back when being on CompuServe cost you six dollars an hour in money, like, back then. And it was the most incredible rush just to know you were talking to all these other people, and it was coming across like 300 bauds. It was like tick, tick, tick, tick.

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Not cost effective, but fun. I have a, I am a founding editor of a website called ProVideoCoalition.com where I write about television subjects. That's sort of a sideline. I am an all around dweeb. I fully admit it. I say to people all the time that back before geek was a good word for people to say to you, I said everybody needs a geek. Who in this room has not had their computer go down and said I need a geek?

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I'm cool with that, you know. I don't have a problem with that description. And Tom called me a citizen scientist. Okay, first question of the nigh, who are these guys? >>

INAUDIBLE

>> The MythBusters. Who was the first person to say that? You have won your aisle a tube of Girl Scout cookies.

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There are more to come. >> There is no eating in the auditorium.

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>> Anyway, yes, please share widely. The guy on the right is Jamie Hyneman, very cool in and of himself, but the guy on the left is Adam Savage, and he said once in a show the essence of the

citizen scientist to me

the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

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I'm not good at writing things down, and that's a big problem. On the other hand, we have computers to do that for us now, and all the data I'm going to show you tonight, and unfortunately it's a lot, was collected by computers. And there are ways to get the data out and make it into graphics, which is a pretty cool thing. This is partially a continuation. One of the proudest things I can say is my previous lecture three years ago was called "Living Solar in the Suburbs" and if you go to Google and type that phrase in, I'm the first thing you'll see. I'm at the top of a Google search. My life is complete.

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How am I conflicted? I am conflicted in four ways about solar energy. First of all, as Tom said, I am a solar energy producer, a solar farmer per se. I'll go into the details in a second. I do own an electric car, as several people in this room I can see now have electric cars of some nature. I am a customer of Madison Gas & Electric. I am not an employee of Madison Gas & Electric. I am not an employee of anybody I'm talking about; however, I am a stockholder in MG&E. And I'll talk about that last. It's the most contentious part of the whole conversation. So we'll just get moving forward here real quickly. Hey, what's that white stuff on my roof there?

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Anybody remember this? This was only a month ago, believe it or not. I was up there with my, you see right there, there's my broom. This has been a very pretty easy winter for solar energy, at least for me, because the snow has been light and fluffy and not thick. So all I needed was my broom this year. Now, having said that, when I went up on my roof to do this in February, even if I cleaned these things off and it got sunny, I wasn't going to get a ton of energy out of them because of details I'll show you in just a second. I have three separate solar systems on my roof. 2400 watts of photovoltaics and a four-panel hot water system. Welcome to my roof.

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Imagine how I got a picture of this. Only geeks can do this.

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That's my roof. I live on the far east side of Madison off Cottage Grove Road. Here's a little compass rose here to give you a feel for the territory. Basically, the valley between the two parts of the house goes straight north/south. So neither of these things are optimally placed to be south-facing, but they're pretty good. They're okay. These are my trees in my backyard. This is what I'm fighting against constantly. You'll notice that the compass rose is flipped around so that south is doing to the upper right-hand corner. And I'll tell you about these three trees. I don't know what the one on the left is, but I know it's on my neighbor's land, up a hill from my house. I'd love to trim it, but I just really can't even ask the person to do that. The birch tree in the middle is on my land, and it's dying, slowly. I should probably cut it down, but I just can't bring myself to do it. The tree on the right is the ash tree on my neighbor's land, and whatever happens to that is going to be pretty interesting with the emerald ash borer and everything. But that is definitely the biggest impediment I have to great sunshine on my roof. But we'll see. Like I said, I'm not going to ask them to take it down. That would be kind of rude. Also very expensive. A arborist who was working for MG&E, oddly enough, told me it would cost $2,000 to take that tree down. So if you have ash trees on your land, people, start thinking about this. Okay, here's my first system. This is 2,400 watts, 1745-watt panels. It was installed in 2007. All of these are strung together in series, and they all feed into a single inverter. This is the device called a Sunny Boy. It's German. Why they picked that name, I have no idea. And it takes all of the DC power that is generated by those panels and converts it to AC and injects it into my system. Actually, that's not exactly true. It goes through a meter first and then gets injected into my electrical box, which you can see right to the right there. It's not a very sophisticated electrical box. It's jammed full of breakers. You couldn't put anymore in there if you had to. This is all seven-year-old stuff. It has never failed. It's all very reliable. On the other hand, I have my four-panel hot water system, which is sort of facing more to the south. I can't really meter how well this works because if I wanted to, I would have to have gas meters on everything in my house that uses gases. The water heater, the furnace, we have a gas fireplace, we have a gas oven or gas stove. So I can't really say that this is super efficient other than the fact that I can show you my gas bill. In the summertime when the sun is really going, you can see that I use virtually no gas. I mean, obviously when you cook something on the stove or something, that's gas. But down there, I am down to one-tenth of a therm a day, which is virtually nothing. And a therm of gas these days I think costs like less than a dollar. The connection charge costs far more than the gas I use in the summertime. Connection charge that's going to be a theme that's going to continue in this lecture over time. So keep that in the back of your head. Then, in 2012, when I bought my Nissan Leaf, which we'll talk about later, I really wanted to try to make it possible to power that from the sun. And I had the folks at Full Spectrum, who do my solar work, speck out a system for me, and the put that on my roof right here. That is seven panels there, 250-watt panels from a company called Helios, which is from Milwaukee and sadly went bankrupt some time ago, although I hear they might be coming back. They have microinverters on them. Not that big box. They have an inverter on the back of every one of those panels, and basically speaking, it just makes the transition right there and injects that electricity right into my circuits in my house. Very efficient and not that hard to manage. Once again, it has been absolutely bulletproof. Has not coughed once. And it makes more electricity than you might guess. So, here I have 4,150 watts of solar goodness. How much does it cost, you're going to ask. Before we get there, let me talk about how efficient they are.

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The 17 panels on the left, each panel is 1,748 square inches. Divide that by 145, you get 12 watts per square inch. Now, you'd think the newer ones would be more efficient, but the newer ones, each panel has 2,574 square inches and only generates 10.2 watts per square inch, oddly enough. That's a 20% decrease in efficiency, but the new ones are far, far less expensive. You have $18,000, after rebates, on my old system. That was $7.50 a watt. The new system cost $7,000 after rebates, and it was only $4 a watt. That is a 47% reduction in cost in four years. And that's in 2012. Now, if you take away the rebates, which are, quite honestly, quite variable. The rebate landscape changes over time something terrible. If I paid cash for my old system, it was $23,000 but that was $9.50 a watt. My new system was $10,000 or $5.71 a watt. Even taking out all of the rebates, that's a 40% reduction right there just purely in cash cost. And that is a trend that has not slowed down. I'll show you an example from my guys at Full Spectrum. And I'll tell you something, I'm not endorsing Full Spectrum here. They just happen to do all my work. There are probably a dozen companies now in Madison that can put solar panels on for you, and across the state, who knows how many. Probably a hundred. Here's what you would be looking at if you wanted to put on 4,000 watts today. It's a long quote, but basically it says $10,000 after rebates. $17,000 before, $10,000 afterward. And if you get into time-of-use metering, that little piece of yellow I just punched up there, they think you can pay back in 10 years. Now, the idea of paying back in 10 years would be wonderful. And just for the record, there are 230 residential solar installations in Madison. How many people, how many residential customers are there in Madison? Or I should say in the MG&E area, which includes other cities. There are 125,000 residential customers in the MG&E area. That's one-one-thousandth of us have solar panels. Not a lot. And keep that in the back of your head too because this is where it starts getting a little contentious. So let's talk about payback. I'm going to make this easy. Oh, before we do this, always get instrumentation on your stuff. You want to be able to know how much you're making and how much you're using. This is a device called an eGauge. It is essentially a box that is a web server that lives inside my electrical box, and I can look at this from anywhere in the world and see how much electricity I'm generating, how much my kids are using. Now, the green spike right there, the green thing in the middle, by the way, I took this yesterday, that's my generation for yesterday. If you look in the box here, I generated 17.5 kilowatt hours, and I used 22 kilowatt hours. That means I generated about 75% of all my electricity yesterday. Yesterday was a very sunny day, and it was kind of cold too. It's hard to believe, but solar panels are more efficient when they're cold than when they're hot. I'd like to know why. I'm not quite that good of a citizen scientist yet. I'll give you a little bit more of this here. This spike to the left there is the Nissan Leaf charging overnight. Time of use metering, my friends. Time of use metering, remember that. And the spike to the right of the green thing is probably, that time of the morning, that's probably the toaster oven running. You get to be pretty good at identifying what's running at various times. I can tell exactly when my wife uses the vacuum cleaner because you wouldn't belie how much electricity vacuum cleaners use. And this is also the instrumentation that's built into the microinverters on my new system. It comes with software. They report over the web to me automatically, and they'll tell me all about whether they're healthy, how much electricity they make, how hot they are. It's very, very cool. But the previous, this is better because it tells you both what you're using and what you're generating, and that's important. You see two very small green lines there. Those are in the middle of the green block. Those are, the higher one is the generation of my larger system, and the lower one is the generation of my smaller system. So you can actually tell the two apart. It's kind of cool that way. So, let's move along to, let's talk about payback. I am on a tariff, MG&E, back in the day when we were all being pioneers, offered us 25 cents per kilowatt hour of all of our generation. It's called the Pg-4 tariff, parallel generation. In seven years, I've generated $4,500 worth of electricity at that rate. If I wasn't in that program, they would only have paid me retail, which is essentially about half of that. So I am sadly thinking to myself there's a very, very good chance that these panels may never pay for themselves, at least not in a reasonable span of time. I don't think there's really too much I can do about that, but, on the other hand, I'm not totally heartbroken about it either. So we'll talk about that near the end. My other system cost $7,000. In three years, I've generated $1,000 worth of electricity. So talking about 17, 19, 20 years of payback on this. There are certain downsides to where I'm at. The tree problem is a problem. The low slope of my roof is not optimal for solar. But, on the other hand, yesterday I made 75% of my electricity. So that's a positive. I like that. So we're going to keep moving along here and talk about electric cars. Look at that lovely, shiny, beautiful electric car. Who here thinks that has anything to do with reality?

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That's my electric car. That thing has so much salt on it, the deer chase it down the road.

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However, if you can read the license plate, it says solar powered on it, and it absolutely is solar powered. I can show it by the numbers. The Leaf is a wonderful car. It has lots of downsides. It has lots of upsides. This particular car just went over 30,000 miles. It has never gone to a gas station and gotten gas. It has very, very little maintenance. We'll talk about that in a second. This is what the car used in 2014. One of the things that comes with the Leaf, at least everything at the very base model of Leaf, is a thing called car wings, which is a telematics system where you can use you cell phone or a computer and talk to the car and see how much, you can turn on the charging, you can turn on the heat when it's plugged in, which, believe me, in the wintertime is an essential thing to do when it's really cold. It tells you all about how much electricity you've used to drive your car. If you can read this, it says, this is my 2014 for the entire year, this was the only way I could get data that was meaningful. I drove 9,068 miles. I used 2,116 kilowatt hours of electricity. Averaged 4.3 miles per kilowatt hour. Annualized over the entire year, that's not too bad. In the summertime, I can easily get 5.5 miles per kilowatt hour. In the winter, four, 3.5 is pretty good because of reasons we will speak about in a second. Here is the electricity use I had in 2104. If you're with MG&E, I'm guessing most of you are, if you haven't signed up for their web service, you absolutely should because you can get all sorts of data on your electrical use, and it's really interactive. You can compare your use against other houses, against everybody in Madison. You get stuff like this. And if you look at the little arrow at the bottom, it tells you that I used 8,747 kilowatt hours. That's 8.7 megawatt hours in a year. That's a lot of electricity, in my book. But I think I have the numbers to back up that I'm kind of a-- I'm good about electricity. I try not to waste it. So, if you look at this, I used 8,747 kilowatt hours. The car used 2,116. 24% of my entire household usage was put into the Leaf to travel 9,000 miles. Here's the electricity I generated last year. They keep track of that as well. I generated 4,027 kilowatt hours between all of my panels. So if you do the math on this, 46% of my usage was provided by solar energy. That's pretty cool over the span of a year. 50% of my solar generation went into the Nissan Leaf. So that means 48% didn't. That means that I literally do have a solar powered, carbon free car. People used to say that the Prius runs on smug.

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citizen scientist to me

Electric cars run on smug plus 10.

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citizen scientist to me

But I don't apologize for that. Now, the question, a lot of people will ask snarky questions about electric cars like how long will the battery last? It's all going to collapse on you, and it's going to be very expensive to fix. Well, that's certainly a question. I have these little data points come out of my car, specifically from my car. You can buy for like eight dollars on Amazon, or anyplace else, a little OBD-II plug, which hooks up to Bluetooth, and if you have the right software, it will go right to your phone or your computer and tell you everything about your car, which is kind of cool. And this one, the Leaf Spy, tells me all about the battery. For example, I'm going to go to the next page just to get to the guts of it. SOH means state of health for your battery, and in 30,000 years, mine is at 87%. Now, to be fair, I didn't see the measurement when I bought, so I'm going to assume it was 100% or close. But I've lost something like 13% of my capacity in my battery. Now, I don't try to drive the thing to Los Angeles. It's going to be just fine. I'd like to be able to take it to Fond du Lac, but I know that's not going to happen. So you use the tool for what it's designed to do. This has gone down 13% in three years. We're going to watch this for a little while. Nissan has announced that they will sell replacement batteries to people for $5,000, which is a lot less than we were guessing it was going to be in the first place. So the car is relatively healthy now. Life is good. But people will always say to me, especially in Madison, especially in cold climates, they will say, where do you charge that thing? And the answer is, of course, you charge it in your garage. I've had people literally say to me, "I don't want to plug my car in every night." I said, "Do you not plug in your cell phone every night?" It takes exactly as much effort. By the way, if you look at this picture really carefully, up in the right-hand corner, there's Brett Favre from 1997. In that picture, he actually has braces on. That's how long I've been living in this house. Where else do you charge? Oh, by the way, there's something I learned about last Saturday at a meeting. This is an inductive charger where you don't have to plug the car in at all. You just drive it over this plate and electricity courses through the air like Nikola Tesla intended it to do.

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And the loss on this is something like 10%. Now, I personally have no problem getting out and plugging my car in, but I think this is really kind of cool. And if you think about the idea of trying to charge on a public street, if they put a row of these things out on a row of parking spots, that'd be great because you can just pull in there and charge up. And honestly, I seriously believe this is going to happen sooner than later. One of the people at the meeting last week has one of these things. It works just great, and I guess the cost was like $1,000. That's a lot of money when it basically replaces a piece of wire, but still, everything gets cheaper over time. Everything electronic gets cheaper over time. Now here's something I discovered over on the east side that is a way to charge to your car that might not be the optimal way to do so. These guys run a business, I blocked out their logo, but they deliver fast food, and this is a Leaf on the left and a Chevy Volt on the right. I applaud them for doing the right thing. Absolutely. But they just basically took 120-volt chargers, which on the Leaf part, by the way, to fill it from zero to the top would take 22 hours, and they're just sitting out there in the middle of the rain. We're not too sure, we talked about this, we're not too sure whether these chargers are actually waterproof or rated for wet conditions. But I should go back and check and see if they're still doing this. But once again, I think the idea of using electric cars to do stuff like this makes all the sense in the world. This is a map from a company called ChargePoint. This shows all of the ChargePoints and other chargers in Madison. We are blessed in this town. If you have an electric car, we are very, very blessed because MG&E has, for four years now at least, had a pilot program out to install chargers to study how people are going to use them. And they were way ahead of the curve on this thing. MG&E has 26 chargers in town. UW here just installed six more chargers on campus. The white three on the left-hand side there is Kohl's in the west side. They have three chargers. There is a lot of opportunity charging available in this town, and most of it actually works. In California, they have a lot more than this, but they have a lot of reports of things being broken all the time, which is not particularly useful. So, where do I charge? This, for example, is the electric vehicle charging station at the new Hy-Vee up in Fitchburg. Anybody been up there? They have a lovely little restaurant inside their grocery store, but they also have four, count them, four chargers outside, and if you have a ChargePoint card you can use them. Here's another one. This is a high speed charging station for a certain subset of cars. MG&E installed this on the east side at the Mobil station that's right across East Wash from Einstein Bagels. And, oddly enough, it's in the same parking lot as another Hy-Vee where they have another medium speed charger. So the Hy-Vee folks have been really into this. So the chances are very, very good that if you have an electric car, if you need a charge, you can find some place to do it, in Madison at least. So, here's our next cookie question. Who is this? >> Elon Musk. >> Who said that? Okay, share your cookies. That is Elon Musk, indeed. I personally think that Elon Musk is a genius, and I want to meet the guy someday. He not only is behind the Tesla electric cars, but he is also behind a company called SpaceX that is very, very, very close to building a rocket booster that would land back on Earth so you can reuse it. I mean, who thinks of this stuff? It's amazing. Anyway, if you have a Tesla car, like somebody I see in the room does, there are places to charge in Madison. This is called a super charger. If you have a Tesla Model S car, which is the most common version at the time, this will charge your Tesla from zero to about 80 in 45 minutes, and that's good for about 200 plus miles range. Now, you say to yourself, well, how many of those are there in the country? Well, the answer is this. There are a lot of them in the country right now, but that's the 2014 map. Here's the 2016 map. And that's going to change a lot of stuff. But you notice, especially in the Midwest and the plains, they're strung along the interstate. So it's basically to help you drive from one side of the country to the other. And they've already actually done a drive from Los Angeles to New York, and they, sadly, bypassed Madison on the way. A bunch of us were sitting out there in the cold, freezing, come visit us, and they just blew right past. If you have Tesla, by the way, and you're driving, you can go up to the Culver's in Mauston. They have chargers behind there as well. This is, by the way, the coverage of the Midwest, our part of the Midwest, in 2016. It's a very exciting thing. I absolutely applaud Tesla and all they're doing. And here is my dream home with my dream car and my dream solar panels. This guy has both a Tesla Model S and a Leaf, and he's got 19 kilowatts on his roof. So he, I'm sure, is generating all of his transportation from his roof. So let's move along to, okay, here's another cookie question. Where is this? Does anybody know where this is? >>

INAUDIBLE

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>> Wynn was first. He was wiggling his finger.

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citizen scientist to me

This is in lot 20, the parking lot you guys just parked in. If you have an electric car and you didn't plug into it, you should have. There are six of these on campus with two hoses a piece. So 12 cars can charge at a time. Unfortunately, they're all behind gates at the moment. I'm not sure whether that's going to change or not. But, yeah, the UW has bought into this, and I'm very happy they did. They were kind of slow to get moving, but they jumped in with two feet and it was really good. I've used these several times with my Leaf. They work great. Now, having a Leaf is not perfect. Well, it is but there are some definite problems with the Leaf. Oddly enough, when you're driving it and it's below 39 degrees and you hit a bump, you hear this clunk sound, and Nissan knows all about it and they don't seem to want to do anything about it, which is quizzical I don't quite get that. It's no secret but they're not going to fix it. It has the world's worst electric window motors. In the wintertime, if you push the window down and then try to pull it back up, it gets this high and stops. And if you hold the switch up, it goes back down.

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So what you end up doing is pulling it up to that point and grabbing it with your handing and yanking it up slowly as it tries to get up there. I don't know why it works so poorly, but it works very poorly. I talked about the telematics system. I can't remember what it's called now. The reason I had to use 2014 data in the car even though I've owned it since 2013, somehow it lost all of my 2013 data, and there will be no retrieving this. And there have been times in the wintertime when you want to turn the charger on or turn the heat on, you get to the cell phone and you turn it on, you send it a text basically to make it work, it just doesn't answer. There have been a lot of rough edges there. Obviously, cold weather brings the battery down a lot. Some people will claim 20% loss; some people will claim 30%. It depends on how you drive the car, of course. But there was a time when my wife took the Leaf fully charged from our house on the far east side, drove it to the far west side, which is about 18 miles, and then drove it all the way back, and it was on one bar of electricity left. But she was driving on the Beltline and probably going kind of fast. That's the reality of it. It's kind of, you'll learn to live with it after a while, I guess. Using heat will make the battery flatten out faster than you can believe. There are two clocks in this thing. There's a center panel where you have the GPS, and then there's the dashboard. There are two separate digital clocks. They're not connected. They don't tell the same time.

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And they speed up and slow down at different speeds. You'd think they could be one connection that would be fixed by computers or something. Not going to happen. And, oddly enough, this thing doesn't have a real shifter. It has a puck that you put your hand on. And to go forward, you pull it backward, and to go backward, you push it forward. I don't really understand what that was all about. Now, it's always fun, though, to see stuff like electric cars show up in popular culture. And I love reading the comics, and I really like Retail. And this was in the paper around Christmastime, and the whole idea of having a car cozy, I kind of dig it. The problem is that what he talks about is that you don't have to keep the car warm to charge it, you have to keep the car warm to drive it. But he's absolutely right, you have to let go of your ego when you drive this car. I'm cool with that. On the other hand, how much maintenance have I put into this car in 30,000 miles? I'll show you. A set of tires. That's it. I mean, it's been in for the factory to look at the front end, but beyond that, no maintenance. Rotate the tires every 10,000 miles. That's it. No maintenance. Just the oil changes have saved me hundreds of dollars. The lack of oil changes have saved me hundreds of dollars. So now we're going to move along to section three called MG&E customer. Remember I said that data is your friend? Here's a bunch of data for you. My wife and I had a Toyota Prius before we had the Leaf, and if you've driven the Prius, you know there's a little panel in there that shows you your miles per gallon on a rolling basis. It gives you a bar every five minutes. And my wife said if every car had one of these things, people would drive a lot better. And I agree with her, until you get to the point where you just don't look at it anymore, which generally happens to people. At least you have the data to work with. Having a web server in my electric box gives me all the data about how I use electricity that, if people had this, they would think about electricity differently. And I'll give you a couple examples. Now, obviously, this follows the same color pattern as before. Red is use and green is generation. It starts in January 2014, ends in January 2015. I think if I push this button it'll show me... I used 8.71 megawatts. I generated just under four megawatts. That's respectable. And far apart from the fact that it's not going to pay for itself, I like to think of the fact that I offset that much carbon. We'll get to that point too. Here are the numbers in number form. I used, basically speaking, between the car and the house, I use 24 kilowatt hours a day. And that sounds like a lot, oddly enough. But you can't really tell. And here's another good reason to get on the MG&E website because, like I said, they let you compare yourself against other houses. This is the page where you will go to to do your electrical use comparison. And if you look at the detail here, my electric use is actually a little bit less than the average home of the 2,100-square-foot variety. I find that surprising because beyond just what I use in the house, put an electric car on top of that. And this ignores my generation. This is just use overall. So I'm doing okay. On the other hand, I go to this page and I compare myself to other Madison homes, and it tells me that I used 13% more electricity than the average home. Now, on the other hand, once again, I have an electric car. It would make sense that I was using more electricity than other people. But I paid $17 less for my electricity. How does that work? What's the key to that? One thing is being aware of things. I'm a pretty parsimonious guy when you talk about electricity. Here is another picture from the eGauge. That's the Leaf charging there, the block that I've marked off. What do you think that that spike on the right-hand side is. >> The vacuum cleaner. >> It is not the vacuum cleaner, although it's a very good guess. You deserve cookies for that, sir.

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Very good. It is the electric clothes dryer. Now, let's be fair about this. The Leaf there was charging at a little more than three kilowatts for about two hours, and the dryer ran for about 20 minutes, but that's because I'll only let the thing run for 20 minutes. If I did seven loads of laundry on a Saturday, the thing would eat up probably 40 kilowatt hours by itself. So, what do I do? Well, obviously, just last weekend I hung my laundry out on the line. And you know what? You're not going to believe this when I show it to you, but I do it in the winter too. That's my shop. Those are my airplanes. I have all this junk in there. My kids are taking over now. They've become geeks as well. But I can run three fans in my basement, in my shop, for a day for less electricity than it takes for me to run the dryer for 45 minutes. And it works just as well. Make the air move around, the temperature is actually not that important. The clothes dry just fine. Although, my family complains about there's not very much softness in the towels, but you got to pay for it somehow. >>

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citizen scientist to me

>> Well, actually, that's the other thing is that this becomes humidity in the air, which is a good thing because it was a pretty dry winter. Also, 67 degrees. Who here keeps their thermostat at 67 degrees in the winter? Wow. Wow. I'm shocked. Higher or lower? >> Lower. >> Lower. Really? >> 58. >> 58? >> 65 day, 60 night. >> Wow. These people are hardcore.

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citizen scientist to me

Excellent. Did you already get cookies. You already got cookies, sorry.

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citizen scientist to me

One tube to a customer. Well, I thought I was being good at 67, but obviously I'm not trying hard enough. I do turn this down to 58 at night, though. >>

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citizen scientist to me

>> There you go. Well, okay, obviously you've already gotten the gospel of keep your temperature down. How about this? Who here has gone to LED lighting? Everybody's got some. Excellent. Excellent. My numbers are a little extreme. I have 70 bulbs in my house, and 59 are LEDs now. And while they say that lighting is only 10% of your electrical load, I don't think I have a picture of it in here, I don't, in my dining room, I had four can lights that each had a 75-watt bulb in it. Early on in the LED revolution, I bought four Cree push-in adapters. You see them all the time now, but they were really novel back then. They are 10 watts. I went from 300 watts to 40 watts. The light is brighter, the light is prettier, it's entirely dimmable, and three months after I bought these things, Focus on Energy offered a $50 rebate. I didn't get that, but still, it was an easy thing to do and it saves energy time again and they do last. I mean, I've had one LED, out of 59, I've had one LED burn out. So they're pretty reliable, and they're getting much, much better as time goes on. As a matter of fact, if you go Home Depot, you can see that Cree, by the way, Cree is the name in this business, has new bulbs that don't have big, like this one I showed here has a big heat sink there. You see that? The new ones don't have that. They convective slots in what would normally be glass but it's plastic to cool the thing passively and you don't have to have all the big metal chunks on them anymore. >> What are your other light bulbs? >> Most of them are CFLs, and I'm trying to get rid of them one by one. I've never liked CFLs very much. I actually had one burn out violently not long ago. Time of use metering, we talked about this. It's kind of a hard, anybody else here on time of use? Of course you are, Russell. Okay, that's three of us in a room of what, 40 people? Actually, that's a little above average. Time of use metering, if you're not home all day and if you don't have a major air conditioning jones, will save you money. It will save you money, and I'll show you why. Look at this graphic here where it shows what's off-peak and what's on-peak. Basically,

on-peak is from 10

00

in the morning until 9

00 at night, Monday through Friday Everything else is off-peak, and I'll show you the prices right now. Off-peak in Madison, 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour. On-peak in the middle of the day, 28.5 cents per kilowatt hour. When do you think I charge my car? 1:30 in the morning until about 4:00, yeah. I'm on green power tomorrow so it cost me like nine cents per kilowatt hour as opposed to it would be 30 or 32 cents per kilowatt hour during the day. Like I said, if you can make this work for you, it's absolutely worth it, and I'll show you the proof. Every six months or so, MG&E sends me a piece of paper, a typed up piece of paper. I think an email would be more efficient, but you know. It tells me whether I made money or lost money on time of use. And this time I reduced my bill by 17% or $279 for that year. And, remember, that includes charging an electric car on top of everything else in my house. That's a huge, huge savings I highly recommend it. Now, I'm not perfect by any stretch. Oh, by the way, I was going to point out, in all of MG&E's area, they have 540 time of use customers out of 125,000 customers. Obviously, there's a lot more room for uptake of this particularly easy technology to use. So, once again, if you think you can make it work, I recommend it. I am no saint. I am not good with ghost loads. My house idles between 350 and 500 watts. Some people have told me that a good house idles at 100 watts. I can't even imagine how I could do this. Here's a picture of a TiVo. What is a TiVo? What are the guts of a TiVo? It's a computer that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and if you don't have the thing running, it doesn't work. So you make the choice to have that convenience and use that electricity. But it's not particularly electrically economical. But that's a choice I have to make. Well, let's go to number four, the contentious part. I am a stockholder. I use the term stockholder in MG&E. I'm not an investor. I don't really know a lot about this. I, a long time ago, did some television work for a man who is an investor, a big time investor, and he told me two things. He said buy the locals and buy something you think you know. I don't really think I know a lot about MG&E, but I know they pay a dividend. And I'm not the kind of guy who buys the stock on a flyer and says, hey, I hope it doubles and I can sell it. I don't want to do that stuff. That's like work. I do what's called dripping, where, basically, every month a certain amount of money goes from me to MG&E and I get the equivalent amount of stock back. It's automatic. And I've been doing that for 10, 12, 13 years now. I don't have a ton of MG&E stock, but I've got enough to pay attention. They did pretty well in the last year, as you can tell by this little chart. But on the other hand, think about Madison, Wisconsin. And I'm not sure where this incentive came from, but like 25 years ago MG&E, in particular, started doing things like saying, hey, let's promote energy efficiency. Let's give people rebates on solar panels. Let's give people rebates on CFLs. They did that a lot actually, and now they do it on LEDs to a certain extent. What they were doing was actually teaching people to use less of what they sell. And, you know, I don't know the actual numbers, but I have a funny feeling that especially in Madison, people have taken this, like I was saying, you run your heat at 56 degrees. Obviously, people have taken this message to heart. But, once again, that's teaching people to use less of what they sell. And I can sort of understand where that's a problem. Let's go through this a little bit carefully here. Here's where it gets a little weird. Now, I can tell you that I pay eight cents per kilowatt hour overnight to charge my car, but I also pay 62 cents a day to hook to the grid. That's the new rate. The rate before was, I think, was like 35 cents. In the last year all of the utilities in Wisconsin applied to the PSC to change their billing to be able to raise their connection rates and possibly lower their actual kilowatt hour rates. It's easy to be unsympathetic to this because, honestly, it was handled terribly. I remember seeing in the paper a press release from MG&E that said, well, we're going to raise the connection rate by 500%. MG&E is a pretty cool company, but they blew away a lot of good press. I mean, 75 years of good press in one press release. Now, they didn't get that, and they're not going to get that, but it was a bad thing to say. And there was an article in the State Journal, I always tell people don't use text-heavy slides. This is a text-heavy slide. You can read it for yourself, but this is what happened at the Public Service Commission meeting. They wanted to go to $67 by 2017. $67 a month to be connected to the grid before you buy electron number one. I was not sympathetic initially, and then I went to a couple of classes that were held at the engineering school last summer that talked about utilities, and I'm a little more sympathetic. So anyway, we'll go down that path. Something about, Phil Montgomery makes two quotes here that are really weird. He says, "Should help customers understand there's a cost to maintain a connection to the electric grid, and that cost doesn't vary with usage." He's right. He's absolutely right, and I have pictures to prove it. But here's the second page. At the very bottom, he says, "The current rates are unfair and reward the precious few who can afford solar panels." I'm sorry, but the future is coming. The price is coming down rapidly, and the precious few is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger by the day, if people want to do it. If you have the facilities, if you have the finances, and you have the solar hole, it's not hard to do this anymore. Not hard at all. By the way, it says here that there are only 160 solar panel customers. It's actually, as I said earlier, 230, but that's one-one-thousandth of the entire constellation of users for MG&E. Now, the Pg-4 rate I talked about before where I get 25 cents per kilowatt hour. Oh, by the way, if you've never seen a electric meter go backwards, here's your chance. Is it going? >> Yep. >> Can you see it? >> Yeah. >> Electric meters go backwards if you feed them enough electricity. The rate that they're offering me is no longer available. It's totally subscribed. They were nice enough that when I put my second set of panels on, they extended or they restarted the time on my old panels. So I have another seven years of this rate on my panels. But even at that, it's not going to pay for them. And the new rate is much, much, much, much, much lower. Essentially, it boils down to they will pay you the retail rate for your electricity until you get to the point where you have made as much as you use for a year. Every kilowatt hour you make after that, they will pay you 3.8 cents per kilowatt hour. There's a big difference between 25 and 3.8. There's also a big difference between 15, which is essentially retail, and 3.8. The environment is not as good as it was, but once again, it was a big experiment back then. And, like I said, I would $517 based on my rate in a year with the new electrical rates. On the other other hand, and I know I keep saying that, how do I feel about these rates? That's Blount Street. That costs money. These two poles and that transformer, they're in my backyard. That costs money. These guys were working on this stuff on Pflaum Road down the street from La Follette a couple of weeks ago. It was 10 below zero, and the wind was blowing. That costs money. There are fixed costs that have to be addressed. Now, I don't think what they originally asked for is fair at all. We have to come to some sort of sensible middle ground where everybody can come out at least even, if not ahead. And I think that MG&E is getting the message. They actually put out this-- here's my big question mark. I don't really get a sense of what the future is, although I think we can probably come to a sensible collaboration for everybody. MG&E seems to be getting the message. They actually have decided to, instead of just announcing their rates, they're going to start consulting with people more than they did. And they actually did that in the rate case that just went by. That's one of the reasons why instead of getting 22 cents per day, or was it $22? I can't remember. They actually took a lower rate for this year and I think for the next year because of people complaining from the Madison community. There's a very loud and vocal utility board group in town that pays attention to that stuff. So I think MG&E's got it going slightly in the right direction. Although, anything can happen. And, okay, here's my next cookie question. Who's this guy? >> Elon Musk. >> Who said Elon Musk? There you go. Funny how this guy keeps showing up, isn't it? Can you read that headline? Tesla batteries to power entire homes out soon. They claim they're going to announce these things by the end of his month or next. And, once again, the devil is in the details. I heard they already do this. Elon Musk's cousin is the CEO of a company called Solar City. And they have been leasing solar panels to people in California and other states for several years now. And in California particularly, they take repurposed old Tesla batteries and make them into packs you put in your garage to store the electricity off your roof. People think that this is going to put utilities out of business, and I can tell you, at least in Wisconsin, it couldn't be farther from the truth. First of all, remember, only one-one-thousandth of us have solar panels at all so far. Secondly, I've been told that the packs they're putting in in California are 10 kilowatt hours. Does anybody remember how many kilowatt hours I use in a day? >> 24. >> Does anybody remember how many days we had no sunshine in December?

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Twenty. Believe me, when you have solar panels, you pay attention to the angle of the sun like you've never done before, and there was just nothing. It was very depressing, especially being before Christmas. That was kind of tough. So anyway, Solar City is now talking about building microgrids that would, basically, replace the utilities in very, very small communities. Once again, this is still experimental. By the way, who's this guy?

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He's the chairman of the board of Solar City as well. So he's got his fingers in every pie, and it's kind of interesting. So let's go to the conclusion here. Nobody's going to like this conclusion. I guaranteed many people that I would have something to say that would hack everybody off in this lecture, and I hope I've done that.

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There's no easy, obvious answer, nor any one reason to go solar. This is the only place where I actually wrote something to read. I'm far more invested in solar energy than most people, and even with that, I don't see a day in the near future when off the grid will be common for normal people, or even for the majority of utility customers. Even with battery banks in the garage, we don't get enough solar energy to keep us entirely off the grid. I calculated that if I had 150 kilowatt hours of batteries in my garage, which would be about the size of a car, that might do it. But you still have to fill it up, and you probably fill it up through the utility. So you're going to be connected for a while. We're going to be connected for a long, long time to come. But, once again, here's another reason to do it. I've saved 18 tons, according to my various computers, 18 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Now, I'll tell you this. If there's a more ephemeral measure than a ton of carbon dioxide, I don't know what it is.

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How big is a ton of carbon dioxide? I'm sure there's somebody on campus here who can tell me, but I have never seen a good answer to that. >>

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>> Thanks, Wynn. The variables strike again, don't they? So anyway, I was reading an article about this in the Washington Post the other day, and there was a guy in the comments that said something that made all the sense to me in the world. I tried to make contact with him, but I couldn't, and I'm using his quote and I hope he doesn't mind. But this really boils it down. It's not a way to save money; it's a way to spend money on things you believe in. And I absolutely do believe in this. Now, once again, he says he's paying $19.25 a month to be connected to the grid. He considers it a bargain. And, you know, that's hard to get your head around when it was cheaper before, but if we have to go there and baby steps, this is one of the steps we have to take. And I'm sorry that I'm not more definitive, but we're early on in the game and it's going to be a fun game so keep yourself in it. I know I'm going to.

Thanks slide goes

Tom Zinnen, the citizen scientist that I've ever met; Dave Benforado and Lauren McFadden at MG&E helping with numbers and stuff; Burke O'Neil is my installer at Full Spectrum, once again, I'm not endorsing them but they've always been good to me; the Madison Leaf Owners Facebook group is a great place to hang out if you want to learn more about electric cars, as I said, there are plenty of people who are on there now, we have like, I think, 150 members; Jake Lipke on the buttons back there covering for me; my long-suffering family; and, of course, you people who are really interested in the future of electricity and energy and it's very important for all of us to do so. So, thank you for your attention.

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