My first robot

Those who know me know I'm not really a neat freak. I'm not dirty, just "lived in". (My desk is the epitome of this. It's a working area, and so, yes, I keep papers and such on my desk.) And still, I try to better myself all the time, getting better about picking things up and such. Some of it's just pride. For example, I got better in the habit of making my bed in the morning when I bought a nice new bed for myself. But it's been the biggest challenge since I moved into my small San Francisco apartment. When I lived in Minneapolis, I had certain areas I kept clean and neat (living room, the media room, kitchen, and of course the bathroom), where I could devote other rooms to work areas (my bedroom where my desk was) and close those off, while maintaining a functioning area. But in my relatively smaller San Francisco apartment that's been more of a challenge. I've met the challenge, such as getting better about throwing things out (storage space is probably the biggest downfall of the apartment), and picking up after myself. Still, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Sure, I could hire a maid. In fact, I would never live with someone else again and not have one. (It saves from a huge amount of fights over who's turn it is to do what!) But I live alone, and have always found better things to spend my money on, be it paying off my student debts, saving towards a new car, or even taking a trip to Yerp. (That's "Europe" in non-yokel.)

But as everyone knows, there's certain tasks that no one likes. I don't mind picking up after myself, but there's three tasks I abhor: dishes, cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming. They are also some of the most frequent tasks.

Dishes, I hate because it's definitely a chore. You get wet, sweaty, dirty. Also paradoxically, I hate dirty dishes. Cleaning the bathroom, again, ew. It's full of germs, dirt, and ew, soap scum. Vacuuming, you get dusty and sweaty, and god do I hate lugging that vacuum out, getting all sweaty (which attracts dust), not to mention it's incredibly noisy. I still do them, I just don't like them.

Other tasks I don't mind so much. Picking up after myself, that's almost a given you should do that. Laundry, less so, as machines do most of the work for you.

So of the chores I like the least, dishes was the first I took care of. In my small apartment (and living alone, so I don't generate all those many dirty dishes), I did find a small dishwasher that's big enough for one person's meal's worth of dishes (a couple plates, silverware, a couple glasses and a pot or pan). It's perfect. It just sits right on the counter, and takes about as much counter space as the drying rack would have. No dirty dishes in the sink again!

Of the others, I didn't really think about them much until more recently. The ickiest stuff (ew, the toilet) I would get those Clorox handiwipes, and wipe down the worst areas just before I'd hop in the shower. For the rest, a coworker of mine recently sung the praises of her automatic shower cleaner (which you can find out about at, of course, www.automaticshowercleaner.com). My only reservation was, where would I put the stuff that's already in the caddy under the shower head, and when the came out with one that had it's own caddy (a $5 coupon, available at the website, helped as well), I went ahead with it. It's not perfect. It misses some places (most notably above the level of it's sprayer, which my shower head is particularly low), it's less than an even spray, but it works amazing well for a first generation product. (It might surprise you that I'm not an early adopter. I typically wait a generation or two until the bugs have been worked out.) But the best part is, cleaning the shower is no longer a chore. I definitely have to clean it less often, and when I do, all the hard work has been done for me. What was a 20 minute job every week or two is now a 5 minute job every other week (with maybe 30 seconds spent a couple times a week getting some of the unspent areas). And most importantly, it stays clean longer, and everything just feels so much cleaner. Because it is.

And last but not least, vacuuming. This is no casual affair. Lugging out the vacuum, doing it only during hours I don't mind pissing off the neighbors with loud noises (or when they're out), heating up the whole apartment with a 1200 watt motor, hauling furniture around and getting myself dusty and sweaty. It's the very definition of a chore. And yet if I don't, it manifests itself as dust throughout my apartment, requiring an additional step of dusting more often if I don't. And so I do. There must be a better way.

So on Saturday, I found the Roomba 4150 was on sale at Target for it's regular price of $199, but came with a $25 gift card. Now, it had been out for a couple years, so I figured most of its bugs had been worked out. Indeed I was correct. Instead of a low-powered NiCad battery, it had a more powerful NiMH battery. I didn't need to charge it for 8 hours in order to start using it (NiMH has no "memory" effect, and charges much faster while having a larger capacity). In fact, I brought an adapter and charged it in the car while I got some lunch and went and washed my car. By the time I got home, it was already half charged and I could start using it right away. I put in down, pressed "start" away it went.

It's almost like having a pet or a small child. It makes a happy little sound and away it goes. It has no sense of sight (except for an infrared sensor for the artificial "walls" you can set up to keep it confined to a space or room), so it'll go until it taps something... a wall or desk or table... and then it changes directions and keeps on going. It's no speed demon. It'll keep going for about half an hour per room, but it is thorough. It makes sure to go over things about three times to make sure it's clean. It has a few different modes. It has a straight away mode (when it's going across a room), a circular mode (when it detects a particularly dirty area, where it goes it circles to make sure it's cleaned, and then it continues on the way it was going) and a wall-finding mode (where it continuously checks where the wall is to make sure the edges are cleaned). It's certainly more thorough than I'd be. It even goes under tables, sofas and beds (as it's only about 2 inches tall, it can usually pretty easily make it under, even under the lip of most cabinets).

So does that make me lazy? No. I think of it like a helper. I move stuff out of its way so it can get those areas better, like under the coffee table or by my desk. And it frees me to do other higher level things, like put away those dishes that were cleaned, and folder the laundry that the machines cleaned. I even mopped the kitchen, which Roomba was so kind to vacuum for me before.

And the most amazing thing? I cleaned my entire apartment, and at the end, I didn't feel either filthy or tired. I still took a shower, but it was just to rinse off more than anything. I realized how dirty the vacuuming was when I emptied the bin, so I had it go over another pass with an empty bin this morning. When I was putting on my shoes, I noted Roomba going over where I walked with my shoes a couple extra times. Did it mind? Did it say "Hey, I just cleaned there!" Nope. It just dutifully went over it a couple extra times and went on it's merry way. When it was done, it just made a happy little sound. As long as you plug it in and keep it charged, it's just a happy little robot. And a clean apartment makes me very happy as well.

T accounts save the world

I went to go pick up some milk at the store last night. On my way in to Safeway, I saw a sign that said "This store is now 100% powered from wind power!" I found this incredibly intriguing, as I hadn't seen a single windmill in San Francisco, let alone in Diamond Heights. Even more so, the Bay Area isn't particularly windy, assuming they bought it from somewhere in the vicinity. Puzzled, I went online to find out more.

So what I did find was the Safeway contracted to derive it's power from wind sources. From where? Well, one utility is up in Solano county, where high atop a hill in a rural area, constant 20 mile an hour winds power scores of 1.8 MW windmills. Still this is one of the few places in the Bay Area rural and windy enough to provide so much power.

So where else are they getting it from? Well, North Dakota for one. I was thinking, man that's an awful long way away to get wind power.

Well, it's an accounting trick really. It's called "alternative compliance." The particular electrons these windmills generated aren't going directly to the stores. Environmentalists came up with an idea and last year put it into law.

The problem is supply and demand. Californians want clean power. The problem is while sunny, solar power is expensive. Wind power is now on par with the cost of grid power, but where it's windy (and rural enough for people not to mind what some people consider an eyesore), they're not real big on clean power. Well, they might be interested, but not big on it like Californians are.

So they figured, why don't they just switch? Basically, Californians would buy the clean power from these windy sources. Then the windy places would buy the regular power from PG&E. The electrons aren't switched, but the accounting all works out. You know, using T accounts to save the world.

The net result is that those who want clean power, their emissions are accounted for (whether CO2 goes into the air in California or North Dakota, it's all the same to the Earth). Basically, California creates a demand for wind power in North Dakota, they get generated there and reduces the need for carbon-based sources, and the overall CO2 production of the closed system (that system being Earth) is lowered. That was basically the idea of the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

You see, there's been a fundamental problem so far with wind power. Actually it's a problem with building any power plant. It's rarely a "if you build it, they will come". While population centers like the coasts generally grow fast enough to do so, people aren't exactly running to the farmlands. (North Dakota actually shrunk in population in the last census.) So while they have a ton of wind (my mother once said that it felt weird on a day when the wind wasn't blowing), they don't have a ton of demand for new energy sources. And their energy from coal-fired plants is cheap enough that they don't want to take them offline because of some patchouli-smelling hippie.

But if some patchouli-smelling hippie (or earth-friendly business, for that matter) contracts to buy wind power from them, and they take the money from the North Dakotan and use that for California's generation, that makes wind power a possibility, as banks are not going to front the money for a million dollars a megawatt of capacity (sounds like a lot, but actually on par with other generators, like gas and coal, and that's amortized over the life of the windmill, typically 25 years, although they typically pay themselves back in 5-7 years) without a buyer waiting in the wings.

So it's a win-win. Now if only individual users (like me!) could sign up to pay a green premium to get our electricity from green sources. Even if it's from North Dakota.

This all works well until the production of these sources outstrips local demand. However, with production of wind and other renewables in the single digit percentages of overall electrical consumption, this won't be a factor for some years. And then other financial incentives (such as paying a premium for clean power, or charging a "carbon fee" for non-green power, just throwing ideas out there) might be used to build better distribution systems, such as more high-voltage lines from wind-rich rural areas to population centers.

Actually, because of North Dakota's power comes mostly from coal (whereas California's comes mostly from nuclear and hydroelectric, the rest from cleaner natural gas), only powering North Dakota with wind power (still utilizing only about 7% of their potential, whereas about 25% of a California's wind potential is already tapped) would eliminate more carbon emmissions than all of California produces, despite having only 1/55th the population. That might make all the better sense if carbon caps (and thus carbon trading) come into play. It might even be used with programs such as PG&E's soon-to-come ClimateSmart program, that allows users to invest in carbon-reducing projects (such as protecting forests or replacing carbon-heavy electrical production with neutral sources such as wind) so their total carbon output is zero (or "climate neutral").

And it's not limited to wind. A user in foggy San Francisco could buy solar from the sunny East Bay, even though my actual electrons might come from the dirty Bay Point plant. My purchase is offsetting some East Bay plant from producing any carbon at all. That East Bay user is actually buying my electrons and I'm buying his.

All in all, it's a pretty clever way to use accounting to save the world.

The smallest thing can save the world

About a month ago, I saw the documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car". It really got me thinking about it, and changed a lot about the way I felt about cars. These cars were truly ahead of their time. But they were far from profitable, and that's why eventually they got killed off. More shockingly, many of the automobile makers actually crushed the cars when they were at the end of the lease (you couldn't buy them), even though they were in perfect working order.

The cars themselves found a niche market, but were far from perfect. They typically only had a range of about 60-100 miles. Their top speed was around 65 MPH. Their acceleration was good, but below average compared to most cars (more a product of the available energy from the batteries than the motors themselves). And if you needed to go more than the range of the car (some people's commutes could easily be more than 60 miles round trip, plus a few errands at the end of the day or at lunch), you had to charge it up, a process which could take hours, assuming you had a charger at your work.

Anyways, jump forward to today. Technology has changed a huge amount in the past 10 years. One of the biggest changes has been in the area of batteries. Largely fed by laptops and cell phones, huge amounts have been spent on research and development on batteries. They can't be small enough, charge fast enough, or hold enough power. Lithium ion (L-ion) batteries are now the norm, and hold large amounts of power. But there's still room for improvement.

Last year, a company called Tesla Motors announced they were introducing an all electric sports car based on the lithium ion batteries. A two-seater, this car would get 250 miles on a single charge, top speed of around 130 MPH, and 0 to 60 in about 4 seconds. Simply put, wow. It's definitely a best of breed of all the things that an electric car is capable of. There's just one problem: it's got a sticker price of $92,000. (Tesla is promises a mid-sized sedan in the next year at a substantially lower price point.)

A 250 mile range is fantastic, considering 99% of the time you would almost never need to go more than that in a single day. Still, should you ever need to go more than that, you have a couple choices. One, you can recharge it (it could be an hour to get up to 80% charge, 3.5 hours at a full charge, assuming you have a 240-volt outlet available). Or you can rent an old gas-car. Neither is convenient.

So I read some months ago about a new technology for instant charging from a company called AltairNano. Basically it uses nano technology to perfectly align the lithium ion molecules so that electrons can easily rush in. It also hugely expands the surface area on which electrons can attract to, quadrupling the storage space for electricity per kilogram. And because the molecules are perfectly aligned to hold the electrons, so unlike traditional lithium ion batteries who's charging cycle causes a expansion (when charged) and collapse (when discharged) of the lithium ion batteries, eventually leading to breakdown (as all of us with laptops know, at which point you have to get new batteries), AltairNano's batteries have almost none, causing them to last 12-20 years. (In laboratory tests, after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles, the batteries still had 85% of their original capacity.) And without the graphite conduits, they're far safer than current technology Li-ion batteries. Oh yeah, and they'll work almost just as well in sub-zero temperatures as they do in the California sun.

That's all and great in the lab, but when can we actually use them?

Sooner than I had ever thought. A company called Phoenix Motorcars announced they were making an all electric sport utility truck. (An mid-sized SUV will shortly follow. Yes, a battery-powered SUV.) Now, a roomy truck? Made in America? What's that going to be like?

The performance is absolutely amazing. While not the Tesla sportster, it comfortably seats five people and a payload in back, has a top speed of 95 MPH, and goes from 0 to 60 in 10 seconds (find any SUV that does that). The first model will have a range of 100-130 miles, later releasing an optional battery pack that will double that (as production of the battery packs ramps up).

And the best part? You can charge it at home overnight in about 6 hours. Basically you wake up every day to a full tank. Or, with that super-fast charging I was talking about, you can go to a super-fast charger (think a gas station for electricity) and charge it to 95% in 10 minutes. The idea is that it'll go as far as your regular car, perform like your regular car (or better!), and fills up just as fast too. No, the chargers are not yet in place today, but places can add them in pretty inexpensively, and they take up almost no room. In fact, one super-fast charger can supply an entire fleet (if they need to top off during the day), with regular cheap 240V outlets providing plenty of power for longer, overnight charging. And unlike gas stations, you can put them in anywhere you can put a car and electricity. A payment system would need to be devised (similar to what you have at a gas station), meaning they might still be relegated to gas stations, but there's no saying they couldn't be in restaurant parking spots too (so you could charge it over lunch or dinner, although it probably would be charged by the time you were served). In fact, it could eliminate the need for most gas stations altogether.

And that 99% of the time you don't have to go over the range in a day, you'll never have to go to a gas station again. Just plug it in like you do your cell phone every night. Forget to plug it in? Just go to the power station for 10 minutes and you got a charge. Assuming you need to.

But how about the price? Well, you're definitely going to get a bit of sticker shock. At first. At $45,000, it's more than most people are going to pay. But about everything else about it is cheaper than your typical gas-powered car.

For one thing, this thing will last forever. With none of the complex moving parts of a gas engine, there's very little maintenance. Rotate the tires, and replace when they wear out (just like a gas car). But no oil changes, no transmission jobs. Oh, just add windshield wiper fluid. Even because the brakes use regenerative "engine" braking, they'll last several times longer than typical brakes. (The same is true on your typical hybrid.) They're expected to last well past 250,000 miles. And the batteries (typically lasting only 5-7 years in other models) is expected to last 250,000 miles or 12+ years, on what was the only big ticket maintanance on an electric vehicle. Typically I would never suggest a lease or loan over 6 years (you don't want big car payments and big repair costs at the same time towards the end of the term), but with a 10-year loan or lease, you could easily push the payments into the affordable level of $400-500/month. And none of the big ticket repairs that typically plague your older internal combustion engine.

And over time of course, as volume sales get higher, they could easily get down to the $20,000-30,000 range (especially for smaller, lighter cars that don't need big engines or batteries), and still last just as long.

And the cost of electricity? Less than half that of a gasoline car. Typical electric cars use about 250-300 watt-hours per mile. (The smaller Tesla is even less, about 180 watts/mile.) Let's just say that's 1/3 kWh. Here in expensive California, base is 13 cents a kilowatt. That's 4 cents a mile. (Time of day pricing, if you only charge it at night when power plants have tons of capacity, could bring that down to 5-8 cents per kWh, or 2-3 cents a mile.) Compare to a car (say like my Saturn) getting 30 MPG. At $2.50 a gallon, that's about 9 cents a mile. And gas ain't getting any cheaper.

So your total cost of ownership is still less than a gas powered car. And that's not taking government incentives into account.

What about emissions? The vast majority of electricity in the US is from coal, some from natural gas, but some from hydroelectric and nuclear. Even assuming you powered it from coal-fired plants, their emissions per mile would be less than a third to a fourth what the best hybrid cars emit. And even less when from natural gas. And grid capacity? By only powering at night when power plants have their most availability, it's estimated an additional 20 million electric cars could be added to the roads without having to add a single power plant.

And the best part? Almost all electricity generated today is from domestic sources, either coal, nuclear, hydroelectric and most natural gas. More of that can come from renewables like sun and wind. Electric cars remain one of our best options for becoming energy independent in the foreseeable future.

And speaking of nanotechnology, a company called Nanosolar has used a similar technology to make super cheap solar panels, expected to be 10-20% the cost of current technology panels, putting solar on par with grid power in terms of cost.

And these are not just possibilities. They're here today. Production has already started, and the first models should roll out of the assembly lines later this year. First to fleets (like cities, companies and post offices), and then for the general public in 2008. In fact, Tesla has already sold out of their entire 2007 model year. And the first one hasn't even rolled off the assembly line yet. (They do this fall.)

Maybe the electric car isn't so dead after all.