ICE or EV with a hurricane bearing down?

[KarenRei]

Situation looking pretty good in the keys - Irma hit at low tide. The track east of Key West in particular means that the winds are offshore on the strong side of the hurricane, minimizing the peak water height. Not the same story on Marathon, but with a low tide hit (and all of this shear Irma is facing), it may well be okay

 

[IhateOPEC]

So, I was part of the evacuation. I was in an ice but I was thinking about this the whole time.

The pluses of the tesla:

Autopilot. Sitting in stop and go traffic for 16 hours gets very tiring. Having the AP take over would have been amazing.

No wait at the superchargers. I drove past 2 superchargers on day 1 of my haaj. They were 70% full while the wait for fuel (if there was any) was an hour in some places.

The negatives:

I brought fuel I purchase before every hurricane season. (I've learned my lesson.) This gave me much less range anxiety. This would have been impossible in a Tesla.

Off the beaten path travel. Google maps was amazing. It diverted me down country roads during the worst of it saving me hours. It also added distance. Would I have felt comfortable doing this in an EV where I MUST go to a supercharger to make it out in time? Unsure. Day 2 of the haaj I took a 5 hour trip all off highway. No superchargers on the way. But plenty of food and gas as the mongol horde was mostly confined to the major arteries.

 

[KarenRei]

Has anyone bothered to look up supercharger statuses today to see what's still operational?

 

[gambit48]

You act like everyone suddenly decides to bug out at the last minute for kicks and giggles, and they could have left a week in advance. A lot of people simply can't afford to leave that early - either they have jobs they need to keep earning money at, or they don't have anywhere to go that wouldn't cost them to stay there (or both).

Isn't that the same argument?

You're just trying to limit the scenario to fit the result you want.

No, I don't live there. For exactly that reason (among many others). Still have family and friends there. Yes, some left way early. Some stayed and rode it out.

Unlike an earthquake, you get plenty of advanced warning to start making your plans for that particular storm, including evacuating a little earlier than others. Why put a time limit as to when you decide to leave your house? A week before? A day before? 5 minutes before? Depending on when you leave, the traffic and gas station situations can change dramatically.

 

[Saghost]

Has anyone bothered to look up supercharger statuses today to see what's still operational?

I'm nowhere near the area, so of course I can't see utilization. According to my car, it's pretty ugly. Somehow Plantation and West Palm are both live, and Ft Myers is showing reduced service. Everything else south of Tampa is closed, and a bunch of sites further north are, too, like Ocala and even Kingsland, GA for some reason.

 

[seattlite2004]

Has anyone bothered to look up supercharger statuses today to see what's still operational?

SUPERCHARGER NETWORK IN FLORIDA AFTER HURRICANE IRMA - MANY TEMPORARY CLOSURES • r/teslamotors

 

[Cloxxki]

So, I was part of the evacuation. I was in an ice but I was thinking about this the whole time.

The pluses of the tesla:

Autopilot. Sitting in stop and go traffic for 16 hours gets very tiring. Having the AP take over would have been amazing.

No wait at the superchargers. I drove past 2 superchargers on day 1 of my haaj. They were 70% full while the wait for fuel (if there was any) was an hour in some places.

The negatives:

I brought fuel I purchase before every hurricane season. (I've learned my lesson.) This gave me much less range anxiety. This would have been impossible in a Tesla.

Off the beaten path travel. Google maps was amazing. It diverted me down country roads during the worst of it saving me hours. It also added distance. Would I have felt comfortable doing this in an EV where I MUST go to a supercharger to make it out in time? Unsure. Day 2 of the haaj I took a 5 hour trip all off highway. No superchargers on the way. But plenty of food and gas as the mongol horde was mostly confined to the major arteries.

A detour may add distance, but may well save consumption versus start-stop traffic. If a detour works, you can drive it as economically as you like. In TM3 some 7 miles per kWh.

I think TM3 needs a tow bar. Some have installed them on MS. If you're going to be an evacuation prepper, the trailer with range extender totally comes into play. On the trailer will be a turbine generator (most effiecient using petrol) and decent size tank plus a big stack of (recycled) batteries. Depending on your technical expertise and budget, it might function as ChaDeMo or CCS. Really, I'd expect someone to make a conversion allowing a Tesla to dip into external batteries mid-drive. Even if limited at 10-15kWh, that will get you outta there, skip fast chargers if flooded or overcrowded.

Generators exist to fit in the trunk or frunk for emergencies, but will charge REALLY slowly. Just to bridge the distance to a fast charger of the start of a really long descend.

 

[X Fan]

I'm nowhere near the area, so of course I can't see utilization. According to my car, it's pretty ugly. Somehow Plantation and West Palm are both live, and Ft Myers is showing reduced service. Everything else south of Tampa is closed, and a bunch of sites further north are, too, like Ocala and even Kingsland, GA for some reason.

Re: kingsland--jax through Savannah was slammed today. Doesn't surprise me that this site would go down.

 

[KarenRei]

As posted in the Hurricane Irma thread, over 10 million people are without power at present due to Irma, which is crazy-high number. They're talking about it in terms of needing a "wholesale rebuild" of the grid. Florida Light and Power has 4,9 million homes and businesses in their territory. Power is down to 4,4 million of them.

Can someone explain to me why the US does so much aboveground wiring, particularly in areas that have both trees and storms? Is it just a costsaving measure?

 

[X Fan]

Here's one article.... google it and you'll understand. Why Burying Power Lines Sounds Better Than It Really Is -- The Motley Fool

Fwiw: Florida has tropical summers, lots of underground acquifers, gets frequent flooding, corrosion is prevalent, etc.

 

[KarenRei]

Here's one article.... google it and you'll understand. Why Burying Power Lines Sounds Better Than It Really Is -- The Motley Fool

Fwiw: Florida has tropical summers, lots of underground acquifers, gets frequent flooding, corrosion is prevalent, etc.

We bury our lines here - all except for the highest power long-distance lines. It really is as good as it sounds; power almost never goes out here, despite some extremely hostile weather. As for the claims:

* We have far more groundwater than Florida; I actually have an underground river on my land which took out a chunk of my canyon with a landslide about five years ago. A third of my land is marsh. This is not uncommon in Iceland. The reason? Instead of being on clay, which water permeates only slowly, we're atop porous/fractured basalt and loose glacial till, with little clay content - interspersed with less permeable layers (such as dikes) that trap the water in the more porous layers above them. So unless you're talking the Everglades, Florida doesn't win a "wet ground" comparison.

* Corrosion: we're an island. The population lives on the coast (salt). It's wet. You don't get a more corrosion-prone environment than that. My land, for example, is maybe 2km from the coast, with a great view of the ocean and the fjörd right down the valley.

I mean, if one is going to make those sort of arguments as in your above article, why aren't your cold water, natural gas and sewage lines also above ground? Less corrosion, easier accessibility, etc right?

 

[X Fan]

^^^^
Well clearly, your island is much better run......

 

[ccutrer]

Can someone explain to me why the US does so much aboveground wiring, particularly in areas that have both trees and storms? Is it just a costsaving measure?

While some argument can be made for greater distances involved, yes, it is just that someone wanted to save a few bucks for the next quarterly earnings report, future problems be damned.

 

[KarenRei]

It seems a culture thing - save money, risk be damned. While here it's prevent risk, saving money be damned

For example, whenever you want to build a new house here you have to have an engineer do all of the structural calculations on it. No engineer making rules of thumb assumptions based on code (we have code here, too, and generally more strict than in the US - but that's not enough). The engineer takes the particular stresses of the given environment where the house will be situated and these are factored into the house's structural model (supplied by the architect) to determine the stresses in each part of the house, which must be within tolerances; the engineer's diagrams are sent to the county office along with the architect's diagrams (and you also have to have diagrams from a certified electrician and a certified plumber, and you have to have a certified construction manager - you can't act as your own manager, at least not without having someone else to "check your work" to make sure that everything is built to spec... this is in addition to the post-construction inspection)

I think we go a bit far with houses, by the way But I do like the reliability of underground power lines.

 

[gambit48]

Whoah! Yeah, not the US way at all. It's fairly easy to disrupt the US power grid from what I've seen. I live in a pretty new and "planned" area that touts the newest in infrastructure (fiber optic internet, wireless power meters, etc), yet the electricity still gets knocked out constantly for what's reported as stupid (IMO) reasons. That's why my vote has always been ICE in a natural disaster that's slowly coming like a hurricane (I understand that my demographic gives me more options than someone in a lower socioeconomic category, but that's true with anything). You can prep with ICE. It's much harder to prep with EV. When everything is going well, then yeah, of course I think EV is better (otherwise I wouldn't be getting an EV). As much as I like the idea of a Tesla towing a trailer filled with Powerwalls and topped with solar panels, that's not realistic for pretty much everyone. The cost and space it takes is too much. Especially compared with a few $5 plastic gas cans you can buy anywhere. Sounds like if I were in Iceland, EV is definitely the way to go in case of a hurricane (you guys have to import gas, or do you have refineries off the coast?). If I lived in Hawaii, EV is definitely the way to go as well.

 

[KarenRei]

We import gas. Second most expensive gasoline in the world - $7,80/gal in US units. Commercial electricity is dirt-cheap, though, so superchargers could have great profit margins.

I'm buying a Model 3 because it basically pays for itself

 

[gambit48]

Holy smokes! How does Iceland get its electricity? Geothermal? Wind? Hydro? Do you guys heat with gas or electricity?

 

[KarenRei]

Holy smokes! How does Iceland get its electricity? Geothermal? Wind? Hydro? Do you guys heat with gas or electricity?

Almost exclusively geothermal (1/3rd of all basaltic lava on Earth in the past 500 years came from Iceland) and hydroelectric (#1 per capita freshwater on Earth, and mountainous terrain). We're just starting out with wind (despite us being one of the windiest places on Earth), simply because we have so much cheap, clean electricity sources already.

And we heat with none of the above - we use geothermal water. It comes to your house, just like cold water. Really, anyone anywhere else could do the same thing; there's no reason that "hot water to the house" has to be geothermal; it could be heated by fossil plants just as easily, or solar thermal, or industrial waste heat, or whatnot. But most people elsewhere don't think of "heat" as a utility. They really should....

Our "hardware" in a house is pretty simple. There's no furnace, because we have hot water as a service. Nor a water heater, for the same reason. No air conditioning because our climate is cool; if it's ever too hot, cracking a window does the trick. No water softeners because our cold water is glacial runoff and the like. Pretty straightforward

 

[Cloxxki]

^^^^
Well clearly, your island is much better run......

They jailed the banksters and don't do much "defense" on other continents. So, affirmative.

 

[Runt8]

They jailed the banksters and don't do much "defense" on other continents. So, affirmative.

Must be nice...