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These increasingly awkward rollout events make me pine for the days of George Blankenship, master showman, who managed to work Elon’s awkward engineer-speak into an exciting event. Now it’s just awkward.

@dave4444 Bean's isn't being entirely altruistic installing these chargers, they're trying to get people to stay longer and spend more! In the Portland Herald piece, a stated goal was to encourage people to spend more time shopping in Freeport generally and Bean's in particular. (How to sound...

I reached out to my friend, Fortunat Mueller, who owns ReVision Energy about the J1772s at Bean's. His project manager writes: Sorry to have been AWOL from the boards, but been very busy lately. Hope to see more of you all now!

@longshadows Welcome! We Tesla-Maniacs are few but fervent, and delighted to add another to the ranks. I live in Portland and summer in South Bristol, so I'm through Brunswick regularly. I hope to meet up with you.

So here's a question: why would Hydro-Québec sell power to New England for anything less than the market price? New Englanders have the choice of importing yet more power, or building our own renewable energy base. I've yet to hear a good argument for the former.

@Gwgan -- very excited that you've got your X! I hope you'll take a run down to Portland sometime.

I'm not going to either place, but Dedham is likely to be more fun because *everyone* there is going to be excited about Tesla. OTOH, at Natick it'll be easier to do snack runs.

Anecdotes that illustrate trends are helpful in getting people's hearts engaged. The comparison I use is to dice: rolling boxcars (6-6) once doesn't show that the die are weighted, but if you get 20 boxcars in 100 rolls, that's pretty clear evidence. One hot day doesn't prove climate change...

Ah -- I see. You're partially right and partially wrong. The tariff for any particular installation is fixed for 20 years, based on when it is built (for on-site installs, for or community solar projects under 250 kW) or its bid in an auction (for grid-scale, large commercial, and community...

I'm puzzled by the question. If/when the Standard Offer rate goes up, the value of not buying power at that rate goes up. The value of your net injections (measured hourly) is fixed at the yet-to-be-determined residential solar rate. Compared to net metering, this proposal offers less upside...

Even if the delivery charge were waived for factory delivery, you'd be stuck paying state and local sales taxes in California (which has very strict rules about this, unlike other states that waive sales taxes for cars being taken directly out of state).

This could be important: Governor LePage and Quebec Premier Couillard Announce Electric Vehicle Corridor Initiative

Once again, it looks like unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Maine is going to impact the lobster industry here. Between the clear impacts of warming on lobsters and also on our shellfish industry here, few people doubt that there's a warming trend. I suspect most will even say human...

The Public Advocate's spreadsheet calculating costs and benefits is available at the Maine PUC website, item #95. I worked a lot on this case and even on this spreadsheet. It's important to note that this feed-in tariff for residential and small businesses (incl. small community solar) is part...

Or even 50 seats and the White House (because the VPOTUS is the President of the Senate and therefore breaks ties). FWIW, the Iowa Electronic Markets currently has the odds of a Democrat-controlled Senate at 53%, Republican control at 40%, and the "Other" (e.g. 50/50) at 7%. IEM also has the...

Hi, all— The good news is that I've taken on a challenging new job. The bad news is that said job is going to demand my full attention, so I need to scale back on my extracurriculars, including moderating the investment forum here. (I'm staying on as moderator for New England and Energy &...

Long answer: browse this thread. Short answer: Model S is great in the snow, but proper snow tires are highly recommended. The Nokian Happ'a R2 are the board's favorite studless winter tires.

Thanks, RiverBrick. I've been debating about buying a CHAdeMO adapter, as Maine has a surprisingly large number of CHAdeMO points.

Current inventory is 695 million barrels, very near the design capacity of 714 million barrels.

Central Boston is doing okay for EV charging infrastructure, mostly because garage owners saw a strategic advantage of putting them in. Tesla commuters need to gain some discipline, though, in NOT using these plugs routinely; only use charging when you really need the juice. Sure, it's tempting...

One of my favorite acceleration spots is from the east-bound toll booth on I-90, just past the Mem Drive exit. There's a nice curve there, too, which adds to the fun.

The City of Boston requires property owners to clear sidewalks within 24 hours after a storm. I was ticketed once for inadequate shoveling (a problem created by my neighbor, but that's another story). I believe that most other towns have similar regulations; the question is enforcement.

My cynical answer to your question: NextEra could choose where to build its project and therefore demand a competitive price from your utility. You, by contrast, are a captive supplier facing a monopsonist. Your public utility commission is supposed to be protecting you, but most PUCs are really...

Using the term "the Arabs" implies more cohesion there than exists. Iran and the Saudis are barely speaking; Iraq has a weak central government and no incentives to play ball with others. Libya has no central government and has three factions pumping as much oil as possible to fuel their...

Thread title updated.

New England, like most other organized markets (but unlike California) has an "forward capacity market" which has the effect of gating new entrants, avoiding boom-bust cycles like we've had in the past. So there shouldn't be a big flood of high-efficiency gas units that kill each others'...

Golden Pizza makes very good pizza, but unfortunately has effectively zero seating—it's set up for pick-up and delivery customers. They do have bathrooms.

From a truly short-term marginal perspective, you can safely assume in California that the marginal source of electricity is natural gas. The advantage of charging overnight is that the energy will come from highly efficient units that are underutilized at night. If you charged during the...

I've added "Boston" to the thread title to help clarify. Of course, now the folks in the UK will complain that I didn't specify WHICH Boston.... :-)

OPEC is pretty much irrelevant today. All discipline has broken down, now that the Saudis are no longer willing to curtail pumping.

Sorry for the slow reply. The $40/month covers the T&D; 7¢/kWh is the cost of the energy (+losses) itself.

75%, which is typical of a modern gas CC (at least at today's gas prices). I'm using a capacity rate of $11/kW-month, which is ISO New England's FERC-filed Net Cost of New Entry.

I'm disgusted that any city would expect its residents to use water like that for any purpose other than flushing toilets. The better-off residents of Flint undoubtedly shifted to using bottled water, making this a classic case of social injustice.

I haven't run the numbers, but I think the $40+7¢ tariff is approximately revenue-neutral to the utility. It also better reflects the true cost to serve: at least in the short term, the actual cost of producing and delivering an extra kWh of power is not 14¢, at least in most hours. You raise an...

Unfortunately the ROI on renewable energy projects is getting crushed by the low prices of natgas -- it dipped to $1.70/MMBtu in December, with some modest recovery recently. The short-term outlook is a gentle rise into the $3.50/MMBtu range, but at current prices, the marginal cost of...

The Iranian nuclear deal has had a huge impact on the oil price. Suddenly Iran's production is on the world market (legally), and Iran has the ability to ramp up production substantially. Speculation on collusion to thwart EVs is just that, speculation. If you want to start a conspiracy theory...

FWIW, I've been using touchless car washes as needed to keep salt off my MS. I'm not going to spring for a hand exterior detail every week, which is about what's needed with the current salt levels on the roads, and I've not seen any issue with the chrome. Micro-scratches on the finish? Yes, but...

Does it bother anyone else that Michigan is asking everyone else in the country to pay for cleaning up this mess? Why don't I hear the GOP presidential candidates raising this as an example of big government?

FWIW, Maine is in a similar situation. Net metering is up for review when solar hits 1% of load (yeah, *one* percent), which milestone was just reached by the largest of the state's utilities, Central Maine Power (a sub of Spain's Iberdrola). The Maine PUC commissioned a study on the value of...

There's a serious problem with the idea of "competition of regulation": when the harm created by weak regulation is primarily borne by other countries, but the benefit of attracting companies to your country is high, then countries have the skewed incentives to develop effective regulation. An...

Friendly reminder that forum guidelines are to provide some summary/comment on articles, rather than just links.

We aren't going to see any big policy moves on energy from Congress this year. Why negotiate with a lame-duck president when the GOP might control the White House and Congress in a year? (Admittedly, I'm not sure if the GOP could be said to "control" the White House under a hypothetical Trump...

Eversource/NStar does indeed have a residential TOU plan; the rates vary both by day/night and by season. It's the Optional Residential Time-of-Use (A5) R-4 rates. Note that this ONLY discounts the transmission and distribution services; I couldn't find a competitive power supplier who quotes...

Fixed for posterity.

I highly recommend the article in a recent issue of The Atlantic, "What was VW Thinking?" which provides an interesting perspective on how corporate culture can lead to apparently bizarre outcomes.

Bhutan uses a Gross Happiness Index working from the sound principle that money can't buy happiness. There are some challenges with this approach, but it certainly changes the terms of debate. For example, suppose a developer proposes to take over some parkland to build a factory. From a GDP...

I find it mind-boggling that, after over 3 years the set of voice commands has not been expanded.

The Atlanta Fed recently updated the estimate of the 2015 Q4 GDP growth, revised upwards to 1.0%: The upward revision was largely due to stronger than expected exports; the Atlanta Fed's model had predicted a bigger hit from the strong dollar than has actually occurred. That said, the stock...

XOM is worth $322B, making it the third most-valuable publicly traded company in the world, after Google and Apple, each worth about 2x XOM. Conservatively, Aramco is worth 5x XOM, considering the scale of reserves Aramco controls and the incredibly low cost of lifting those reserves. So, yes, I...

This post was in moderation for a bit, so I wanted to make sure everyone saw it: