Happy summer solstice to all my fellow sun-worshippers!
I am not a religious person, but I do celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. My celebrations look different every time. Sometimes I can only manage to find a moment for contemplation, but when I have more time, I like to make art. One year I made a burning teeter-totter sculpture for the fall equinox, hoping to capture the themes of balance and the transition from light into darkness.
The scientist in me enjoys the fact that solstices and equinoxes mark objective turning points in the annual waxing and waning of daylight. I also like how these junctures divide the year up into four manageable chunks, each with a distinct emotional flavor and symbolism. And this year, coincidentally, I acquired my F-150 Lightning on the spring equinox. So I figured that today, the longest day of the year, is a perfect occasion to share some reflections on my first three months of Truck Life.
A headline statistic: In the first three months of owning my truck, I’ve put 5000 miles on it.
I have to say, I’m a bit shocked by this number! The average American drives about 15,000 miles a year, whereas I’m on pace for 20,000. I’ve been eating up pavement about 33% faster than the norm in the most car-addicted nation on the planet.
These are EV miles we’re talking about, so at least I didn’t spew a 5000-mile long plume of carbon dioxide and particulates out of my tailpipe. (My truck doesn’t even have a tailpipe.) But still, driving a 6000-pound machine for 5000 miles takes a lot of energy, and that energy had to come from somewhere.
How much energy, exactly? At my truck’s efficiency of 2 mi/kWh, 5000 miles requires 2500 kWh of energy. I used that energy over the course of about 90 days, meaning I was using about 27 kWh per day, on average. That’s equivalent to consuming a little more than 1 kW, continuously.
I like to think of 1 kW as a toaster. Meaning, if I had put a toaster on full blast back on March 21st and just left it running for the past three months, that would have used about the same amount of energy as my gallivanting.
Does that seem like a lot of energy to you? So I added one perma-toaster to the grid, that doesn’t sound so bad! Well, for comparison, the average American household also uses about this much electricity. (This site claims 10,500 kWh per year, or 28.75 kWh/day.) So, in terms of total average energy demand, my truck has been equivalent to a typical American household!
That seems fitting, given that I have practically been living out of it. The truth is, I’ve been a tumbleweed, and people are noticing. My therapist told me, “You’re hard to keep track of these days.”
Fair enough. I have been all over the place. I took the truck all the way down to Richmond, Virginia, for a solar development conference, and was pleased to find that the Tesla Supercharger network makes it easy to take long road trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
I took the truck to Québec to visit a Nordic sauna, and juiced up at a DC fast charger with Hydro-Québec branding. That was almost certainly the cleanest electricity I’ve put into my truck. Québec is dammed to the gills, and their grid is essentially fossil-free.
I took friends hiking in the mountains in New Hampshire. I pitched my tent in the truck bed and camped on the shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont.
Over all those thousands of miles, the truck performed flawlessly. Until yesterday, when I got a flat tire on the way into town. I steered to the nearest gas station, watching the tire pressure drop precipitously. I paid 2 dollars to temporarily pump the tire back up, and then limped to an auto shop around the corner.
While inspecting my tire, the mechanic at the shop asked me why I went electric. This was in the middle of the first big heat wave of the summer, so I decided to just go for it. With sweat dripping off my brow, I said, “Heat waves like this will just become more common as long as we’re burning fossil fuels. So I’m trying to get off them.”
Perhaps not the wisest thing to say to an auto mechanic with his hands on my truck. After all, his profession depends on servicing fossil-fueled vehicles! (Electric vehicles need mechanics, too, but are far simpler and require far less maintenance than traditional cars. Meaning, a world of mostly EVs is a world with far fewer car mechanics. This is already happening in California.)
The mechanic paused for a moment, focused on plugging my tire. Then he said, with a smile, “Whatever works for you, I guess. I’m the opposite. I like to feel the engine in my bones when I’m driving.”
As much as I love my whisper-quiet electric truck, I get his perspective. I recently had reason to take my old ride — a ‘94 stick-shift Corolla — for a spin around Boston. I became one with the machine, weaving through unimaginable traffic and New England’s worst drivers. It was a blast.
Progress always involves leaving good things behind.
As befits spring, the past three months have been a time of very rapid change in my life. There has been a lot of instability. My concept of “home” has more or less dissolved. It’s been really, really hard.
But the summer solstice has a different vibe. A solstice is a pause. Now is the time of year when the daylight is maximized, and for a brief moment, it stays that way. (Today, the derivative of daylight with respect to time is zero.) It’s right there in the etymology: sun stop. The sun has arrived.
I, too, feel that I have arrived. This summer, my good friends Ben and Jana have invited me to live in a very cozy tiny house on their land in Vermont. It’s off-grid, so of course I’m setting up a sweet solar system.
I also got a job doing carpentry for the summer, which means my office views are getting a massive upgrade.
Oh, and my truck has a name. It’s Big Dog. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.
I may not achieve this, but I have a goal of setting up a solar system that is big enough to meaningfully charge Big Dog. How big would that solar system have to be? A typical “Level 2” home charger that you would install in your garage provides about 6 kW of power, so that’s a good number to shoot for. Coincidentally, this is also about the size of the array that I would need to cover Big Dog’s energy consumption over the past three months. (I’ve been averaging about 50 miles of driving per day, which means I would need to produce about 25 kWh/day. With perhaps 5 or 6 peak sun hours per day in the summer in Vermont, an array of 5-6 kW should do the trick.)
That would be about 20 panels. I already have the panels, but the other system components (racking and the inverter) would be pricey, probably a few thousand dollars. So you know what I’ll be saving my carpentry wages for!
—Jake
Jake, I so enjoyed this new post! Wherever your life path leads you, I hope you'll keep writing. I know I'm biased as your Ma, but your writing style really captivates me. So easy to read. Well done, dear boy!