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Grace

January 31, 2019 by Grace Leave a Comment

Coldest Drive EVer

Today we recorded the coldest temperature in Chicago in Chicago with an air temp of -23 and a “feels like” temp of -50 with the wind chill. Of course, this meant that I simply HAD to take the Leaf for a spin. Truth be told, I was a bit nervous that the car would conk out mid-drive and we’d be stranded, a dangerous prospect for us and the tow truck driver who would come to our rescue. BUT, I am pleased to report that the Leaf started up just like normal, had no issues while driving, and started again after being parked on the street for five hours!

I made my first-ever YouTube video of the trip! Please watch it here and enjoy the ride.

Filed Under: Blog, Leaf-ing Around Chicagoland

November 14, 2017 by Grace Leave a Comment

Winter is Here!

It’s only November but it’s cold alright, and the impact on the Leaf is quite clear and dramatic. Throughout the summer and early fall, the car had a range of 120 miles when fully charged. As soon as the temperature dropped below 45 degrees (F), the range at 100% charged dropped to 91 miles, a loss of almost 25%. If the heat is activated, the range drops by another 14 miles. Ouch.

I have been fairly dismissive of charging stations at my destinations thus far, they simply haven’t been necessary for even my longest round trips of 80 miles. But now, the range anxiety is back as I worry about getting to my destination and finding the charging station already in use by another EV driver. I’m still new to these apps but it doesn’t look like I can reserve a charging port in advance. If that’s the case, then I would suggest to ChargePoint and EVGo that they enable reservations in the very near future.

In the summer I avoided use of the air conditioning as much as possible, and I am now testing the winter driving without heat. Comfort-wise it’s been fine thus far, although I plan to keep blankets in the car as the temperature plummets. Unfortunately, I have needed to turn on the heat to dissipate the window fog. Sometimes it goes away by opening the windows for a minute or two, but in other cases only the heat provides a clear view.

We are still charging the vehicle only overnight, so I have not been able to determine if the cold also lengthens the amount of time it takes the battery to charge. And yes, we are still on the 120V ‘trickle charge’! It turns out that running the 240V to the garage will take some effort. The garage is old enough that it is serviced by insulated wiring, not buried conduit, so we need to dig an 18” trench from the house to the garage. Now that the ground is about to freeze, I guess I should have checked into this over the summer while I was too busy not worrying about it!

Filed Under: Blog

September 18, 2017 by Grace Leave a Comment

Cost Savings, and then Some!

It took a little bit of work, but reviewing the last two billing cycles and diving into the details of the bill online, I have calculated that it costs $2.55 to fully charge the Leaf. I then calculated that it would cost $13.20 to get 120 miles out of a 25 MPG conventional car, that’s a really big difference! This is a big part of the “total cost of ownership” calculation that is so hard to articulate for folks who might consider an EV, but are turned off by the initial sticker shock.

I have 14 years of utility data, but there are many factors that make a linear, apples-to-apples comparison difficult. Our building has had many energy efficiency upgrades over that time, from insulation and new appliances to LED light bulbs, and adding the weather and rate changes into the mix makes isolating the electrical consumption of the Leaf somewhat difficult. BUT, just using an average of the last three years after most of those upgrades were complete, it looks like the Leaf will increase our bill by 20%. This will add up to about $325 per year to keep the car charged to meet our needs.

Sparing you again from the weeds I dug through to calculate the annual cost of gas for our previous small car, which switched from a 25 MPG conventional car to a 40 MPG hybrid during the study period, and knowing how much gas prices have changed in the last three years, the annual average gas cost was around $900 per year. Should these estimates pan out, the Leaf will save us around $575 per year.

What I really like about that savings figure is the impact it could have on the regional economy if ownership of electric vehicles was widespread. In 2012, we produced a report for Clean Fuels Ohio that calculated such an impact, and it’s really impressive. To summarize, $750 of that $900 we used to spend on gas (86%) leaves the regional economy to pay for the primary activities of extraction and refining, leaving only $150 to be spent locally on job-creating activities like shopping and going to the movies. With the Leaf, we now have $575 in our pocket to spend, almost three times as much!

There are 1.9 million households in Chicago, and the US Census reports there are 1.1 vehicles per household. Now, imagine that extra $425 per household multiplied by 11,000 EVs, which is only 1% of those household vehicles, and the result is nearly FIVE MILLION DOLLARS being spent at coffee shops, movie theaters, restaurants, babysitters, taquerias, sports bars, hardware stores, and more, instead of leaving the region. That’s just in one city, in just one state. WOW.

Filed Under: Blog, Leaf-ing Around Chicagoland

August 11, 2017 by Grace

Go for a Drive, Gain Range

I had the most amazing experience driving the Leaf recently – I drove 15 miles and actually GAINED 5 miles of charge while driving!  I assume this was due to the regenerative braking system, and my valiant attempts to hypermile, but still, I found it remarkable.  Maybe it was because I was driving back to work from an electrical vehicle seminar hosted by Chicago Area Clean Cities?

After one month of driving the Leaf I believe my range anxiety is cured, but I also have a new and somewhat surprising outlook on these cars.  I am a Midwesterner, so to me, a road trip vehicle needs to be able to go 300 miles with no more than 15 minutes on a fill up/recharge.  Now, I know that Tesla is there already and building its nationwide network of charging stations, but even at $35K for the common-folk model, it’s still fairly unattainable.  I also understand that the 2018 Nissan Leaf will have a range of 250 miles, but I have a radical proposition: is it possible that long distance just isn’t the point for EVs?

We know that 92% of daily commutes are less than 70 miles round trip.  I am in that group, and thus far I charge at home at night only three days per week, and I have only used charging stations at destinations for experimental purposes.  Would more people consider owning an EV if they knew that charging at home would cover virtually all of their driving needs?

What if we were to change the discussion, and consider our whole travelling system differently?  Households that need multiple cars for daily use could easily make it on one EV, and have unlimited road trip use of their conventional vehicle.  Households that need only one vehicle could cover the cost of renting a gas car for long drives when needed, using their annual EV fuel savings.  I have heard these discussions in professional circles, but not in the mainstream nor in consumer media.  Thoughts?

Filed Under: Blog, Leaf-ing Around Chicagoland

July 22, 2017 by Grace Leave a Comment

To Charge or Not to Charge?

I took the Leaf for its longest round trip today without charging at my destination, 22 miles each way. Now, technically, we know that the Leaf has a range of 120 miles on a full charge, so obviously it could make the round trip with no issue. But logical thinking like that is not how the ‘range anxiety’ mind works!

With range anxiety, a driver feels, in her gut, that the car will grind to a halt in the middle of the highway and she’ll be trapped with no help of rescue, because it’s not like roadside assistance travels with mobile lithium battery chargers. So frankly, her electric vehicle will simply become part of the roadway and she’ll lose all her money and never have a car to drive ever again.

I am pleased to report that after 12 days of driving, I have already become quite trusting of the car’s ability to get me from Point A to Point B and back again without being on a full charge at all times. In fact, today the car was down to 50% charge for the first time, and I may not even plug it in tonight! OK, I probably will but only after 9 pm, and only if it stops raining.

Thus far we plug in about every other day. I definitely don’t bother to charge if the car is at 80% charged or greater, maybe not even at 70%. I would definitely plug in at 60% or less. I’ll have to look back at this in a few months to see if I have lowered my threshold.

Livin’ on the edge! Only 50% charged.

Filed Under: Blog, In the news

July 12, 2017 by Grace Leave a Comment

Leaf-ing Around Chicagoland

Five years after publishing a report on the positive economic impacts of electric vehicles, we finally got on board: Quercus Consulting’s company fleet now includes a 2017 Nissan Leaf SV! Today I took it for our first long drive, a round trip of 80 miles. Spoiler alert: it worked great and we didn’t run out of juice! Here’s what you really want to know:

Range: We made the purchase decision pretty quickly (minus the 5-year deliberation period), so we do not yet have a Level 2 charging port in the garage. In the past four days of driving the Leaf, all of our round trips have been five miles or less, so using the 120V “trickle” outlet from 9 pm to 6 am has been sufficient. Today’s trip was to visit our client at the College of Lake County, which just installed a ChargePoint station two weeks ago, lucky us!

We started the trip with an almost full charge and a range of 98 miles – it’s hot today so we had the AC on, which reduced the range by 11 miles – and arrived at CLC with 67 miles available, or 66% charged. That was more than enough to return, but we wanted to try the Level 2 charger and wow, what a difference from the 120V! In 2.5 hours of charging we were back to 100% charged with a range of 110 miles, including AC. How fast can I get an electrician to install a 240V outlet in the garage?

Cost to Charge: The rate to charge depends on the host site. At CLC it was free (thanks!), but looking at the ChargePoint app, another station along our route would have charged $2 per hour, so the cost would have been $5 for the 2.5 hours. Equating that to a conventional compact car with a 13-gallon tank at 66% full, the cost to top off would be just under $11.50 at today’s gas price. If you’re interested in the cost to buy the car itself, please see the post “We Heart Utility Rebates.”

Filed Under: Blog, In the news

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Quercus Consulting is a strategic advisory firm with a specialty in environmental policy. The firm is certified woman-owned and DBE/ACDBE in multiple states.

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