Phase 1: Service Upgrade

Most homes are currently wired with 100A coming to the house and connecting into a 100A main panel. Historically this is plenty for most homes that use natural gas, but not enough to simultaneously power everything if it's all electric. There simply isn't enough capacity to, say, charge 2 cars, dry clothes, and cook at the same time. 

There are a few solutions to this:

• Change behavior to not charge cars, dry clothes, and cook at the same time. While this is do-able, we're never going to convince millions of households to voluntarily electrify if they have to change behavior. We need to make the clean future MORE attractive, not less.
• Upgrade service to 200A. This involves an electrician, city inspection, and utility inspection. Plus buying and installing an upgraded main panel designed for the increased load
• Get a load shifting smart panel. New products on the market like Span can automatically and dynamically adjust loads to keep your system functioning. Have spare capacity? Charge the car faster. Need to wash clothes? Stop charging the car. 

These aren't mutually exclusive. For example, we probably will want both a service upgrade and a smart panel. 

The service upgrade is one of our first priorities. We don't want to be in a situation in the future where, say, our hot water tank breaks, but we can't switch to electric because our house can't handle the increased load. And since it can take weeks or months to get a service upgrade (city inspection, utility inspection, and actually finding an electrician who can start work), which is too long to go without hot water. 

Oh, and the service upgrade is sorta forcing our hand to decide on a smart panel now. We likely don't want to buy an upgraded panel now, only to replace it with a Span down the road -- that's just wasteful. And we'll also want our (eventual) storage batteries connected to the smart panel. No sense hardwiring them up to our critical loads, only to rewire it to a smart panel later. So this adds more moving parts to Phase 1, but it's probably the better plan.

PS a smart panel and a smart meter are different. Most modern homes have smart meters... they send your usage data back to the utility without a human coming out to read the meter. Quite common and you'd never know it. Smart panels are very new innovations. Your circuit breaker goes inside the smart panel, automatically controls where power is flowing in your house, and gives you a pretty mobile app to control it all.

Starting our Journey to Electrify Everything

Our New Years resolution is to electrify everything in our home and transportation. We want to be on 100% renewable energy by 2025*.

Our current (pun intended) situation, like most folks, is about as far from that as possible:

Our house uses gas heat, gas hot water, gas stove, gas washer/dryer, and a gas fireplace. And we drive 2 gas cars.

To add to the complexity, we are also planning an outdoor renovation in 2022. The original designs included a gas fire pit, a gas grill, and a hot tub, so we'll be revisiting those decision too.

We are now a few months into the process and I am shocked (i love puns so much) at the cost & complexity of it all. It's also hard to find reliable information. And we're coming into this highly motivated, informed, and able to afford the current (i love puns) upfront costs. So if it's hard for us, we're never going to get 100 million homes converted in time. So I decided to write it our experience as we go. I'd expect large swaths of it to be boring, and other parts to be unique to our specific situation. But maybe there will be some useful nuggets of wisdom in there. Or at least some puns.

PS This blog (probably) won't go into all the details of why we MUST to clean up the power grid and why electrifying everything with renewable energy is our inevitable future. You can read books by better writers than me: Electrify by Saul Griffith or Speed and Scale by John Doerr are quite accessible. Or if you're more of a podcast person, here's an interview with Saul on Vox. 

Onward and upward!

* 2025 is arbitrary. We want to be really aggressive with our timeline, but we also don't want to throw relatively new and working appliances into a landfill. So it could be sooner or later. The tradeoff between committed emissions (how much our existing fossil fuel machines will continue to pollute) vs trashing appliances before their end-of-life is one example of a really hard question we're facing. Do we drive our gas car into the ground? Or trade it in ASAP? What about a stove? Hot water heater? When is the "best" time to upgrade appliances, environmentally speaking?