beaviskhan

Brought to you by the people who have complained bitterly for decades about federal overreach and excessive government spending. Oh, the irony.

Correct, solar not needed. Depending on your battery capacity and usage patterns you could enroll in one of the plans that lets you pay cheaper rates off-peak to charge your batteries from the grid, and then power your house off the batteries during peak times. Some places this makes a lot of sense - the spread here (between off-peak, flat rate, and peak) is not favorable enough to make it interesting though, as far as I can tell.

This article is all over the place, but the principle is pretty simple - rather than adding more generation for peak usage times, batteries store energy generated off peak and smooth out the macro usage trends.

Our local utility in NC has a program where they'll pay you ~$50/battery/month to enroll in their virtual power plant program. In exchange, they can take control of your battery up to 36 times per year for a period of a couple hours. Summer events are typically early evening during peak air conditioning times. Winter events are typically early morning during peak heating times.

In practice this means one of two things:

* They make your battery charge to full capacity in advance of the event, and then you run your home off the battery and don't take any power from the grid during that time * Sometimes you'll also return power to the grid beyond that used by your house - they pay you the contracted rate for the power you deliver

We've paired our batteries with solar panels, so generally we have a full charge going into the summer VPP events. We have gas heat, but I expect we'll pay for at least some grid energy to charge batteries during the winter events. Regardless, it's been a good program for us - even without solar, we would not pay for any more power than we used, and the monthly rebate from the utility makes the economics of the system a lot more favorable, especially here in the land of relatively cheap coal power.

Most modern batteries like this are weatherproof and can be mounted outside the home. Most modern batteries use LiFePO4 chemistry, which while not perfect, is much less risky in terms of thermal runaway than older lithium ion batteries.

Not "will be": "are being" abused. Even a cursory search finds many cases of police abusing the information to stalk exes, for example.

> flight times of up to 22 hours

Making flight connections is never fun, but this sounds absolutely brutal.

It is indeed wild that the easiest way to do large-scale logging in those days was to slap together some tracks and roadbed and run trains up the valley. And then tear it all down again when it was time to move to the next one.

I think you've got an extra zero in there somewhere

$35k - $26k = $9k

$9k / $0.12/mile savings ~= 75,000 miles breakeven

We are mostly using Standard_DXds_v4

Newer generation SKUs (which that one is) are often in short supply. I have plenty of bad things to say about Azure, but I've never had trouble getting capacity older than bleeding edge in eastus2 and centralus regions, at least.

You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.

> I probably have five different systems

This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.

Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.