Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home

This is the fourth in a 5-part series about how buying a diesel vehicle in 2013 resulted in an electric car and renewable solar panels on our house in 2016. 

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

Here's the story synopsis so far; we own a VW Golf TDI that pollutes much more than VW claimed. VW has offered to buy the car back, and to replace it, we decided to buy an electric/hybrid Chevrolet Volt. Now we are figuring out how to power it without adding ANY carbon to the atmosphere.

The 2016 used Chevrolet Volt we purchased in September.

The 2016 Chevrolet Volt gets somewhere between 40 and 50 miles per charge, and then fires up a small gas engine to power the battery that actually moves the wheels. At my workplace, the company is offering free charging as part of a pilot electric vehicle program. I spoke with the person in charge of the electric vehicle (EV) program and while they don't have any plans to end the pilot, as more people by EVs, they may start charging a fee to juice up or it will get increasingly difficult to find an open charger due to demand. At a commercial-grade charger, tt takes about four hours to fully charge 50-mile battery. With two stations, that means about four cars can juice up in a typical 8-hour work day.

So for now I could charge the vehicle at work. BUT, the power I get there is still from a coal or natural gas-fired power plant emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

We could go start to purchase energy from the Madison Gas & Electric (MG&E) green power program. This allows us to pay a premium for sustainably-generated electrons. Now, I know that the electrons made on a wind farm in Iowa, or from a solar array far from Madison aren't actually going to come to my house, but the point is that we're paying a premium so that sustainable electrons are being made somewhere. However, what's the actual return on investment (ROI) of the premium paid for those electrons? There is less carbon in the atmosphere. And we're encouraging our local power utility to do more such sustainable projects. But I'm thinking about an actual dollars and cents ROI on an investment into clean energy.

As I pondered a replacement for the Volkswagen, I took a tour this summer that opened my eyes to Claire Strader had an open house and I had always wanted to see her garden and yard. She's a farmer, so I wanted to see how she took her big-scale farming knowledge and applied it to an urban lot. I saw her lovely front yard vegetable gardens, her orchard in the back and a few busy bee hives. And then she told us to turn around and pointed out the the new solar photo voltaic (PV) array that had been installed on the roof just weeks before. Roughly a third of her total roofdirect current (DC) electricity. An inverter converts it to alternating current (AC) which is fed into the local utility's power grid. An electric meter on her house tracks energy created and used.
was covered in panels. These panels capture sun and generate
new possibilities. A friend of mine,

"This is all fine," you say, "until a cloudy day or at night, or even in winter when the days are short." You are right, all of these things are still true even when you put a PV array on your house. So, what does Claire do when she wants lights in the winter or at night?

During the day, she generates and adds electrons to the utility's network and other people use it. When adding electricity to the grid, her meter runs BACKWARD. At night, and on cloudy days, Claire uses electricity from the utility network and her meter runs forward, counting up kilowatts used. And the next sunny day, it runs backward again. Do you see where this is going?Each month the local utility sends Claire a summary of the electrical energy she created and the energy she used and they reconcile. Maybe Claire used a few more kilowatts than she made, so she sends some money to the utility. And if Claire made more than she needed, the utility pays for the excess energy.

Well then, cover the entire roof with panels you say! In fact, Claire had lots of room to add more panels. Not so fast. Our local utility, MG&E sells energy to Claire for $.13 a kilowatt, but buys it back for $.04. Since it costs more than $.04/kilowatt to install panels, but less than $.13, it makes sense from a return on investment point of view to put on just enough panels to cover all your power needs, but not to overbuild the system. MG&E will pay you for it, but for pennies on what you pay to install the panels.

In the next segment of this mini-series, I'll write about what we decided to do to power our Chevy Volt without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt

This is the third in a 5-part series about how buying a diesel vehicle in 2013 resulted in an electric car and renewable solar panels on our house in 2016. 

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

The Chevrolet Volt was high on my want list in 2013, but at that time a new one was running close to $40K, and even after federal tax credits it was just beyond my price comfort zone. At the time, buying used hadn't crossed my mind.

Here's your one-paragraph introduction to the Volt. The vehicle operates as a plug-in pure battery electric vehicle until its battery capacity drops to a predetermined threshold from full charge. From there its 1.5-liter internal combustion engine powers an electric generator to extend the vehicle's range as needed. The Volt's regenerative braking contributes to the on-board electricity generation. Under the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the EV range is 53 miles, and its EPA rated fuel economy in charge-sustaining mode is 42 MPG. Thus, it's like a Toyota Prius in that it's a hybrid electric/gas with regenerative braking and other power saving features. But it's also like a dedicated electric vehicle like the Nissan Leaf or the Tesla in that the drive train is pure electric. The gas engine does not drive the wheels, it powers the battery that drives the wheels. And thanks to the 40-50 mile range, it's entirely possible that except for longer or out of town trips, the average American commuter wouldn't have to put gas in it much at all.

Contrary to when I bought the VW, this time buying used was definitely on my mind. I started looking at used Volts. Anything in the 2013-15 range was definitely affordable. If we added a couple thousand dollars to the VW buyback payout, a used 2016 was possible too. Jay and I decided to pursue one. For my birthday in July we test drove a 2015 and a 2016 Volt. The body style change between 2015 and 16 is significant, and the newer model gets about 10 more miles to a charge. We both fell in love with the 2016 during the test drive.

The 2016 Chevrolet Volt we bought in late September.

I set up a few automated online searches and started getting notified when used Volts came on the market. My uncle, also in the VW buyback situation, was also interested in a Volt, so we talked about our searches. One day he called to tell me he bought one, and that the dealership had a nearly identical twin. I called the dealer but by the time we got in touch, it was already gone. The salesman told me he'd keep me in mind if he got another one in. A few days later he called me about a 2016 with 2,000 miles. I bought it sight unseen.

Now, you ask, "What on earth does this have to do with being an urbane farmer?" Nothing really, unless you consider all the things I do as an urban farmer is part of an overall strategy to be sustainable, including care for the earth, people and financial sustainability. Buying an electric car that we will likely put very little gasoline into is sustainable. NOT putting out the nitrous oxide from the VW Golf TDI is sustainable. And powering it with electricity is, well, that's questionable.

I've read that while the actual electric vehicle doesn't put out any emissions, that power to move the car is created somewhere. In the midwest it's mostly from burning something, coal or natural gas. There are some wind farms around, but it's still a small portion of the overall power generation portfolio. So, I started to think about how could we power this vehicle in a truly sustainable way. I mean, buy not contributing ANY CO2 to the atmosphere either out of the tailpipe or out of a power plant smokestack.

In our house, Jay and I have a saying, "If a project starts with changing a door handle, it will end with a bathroom remodel." True to our saying, selling our Golf and getting a Volt indeed ends up with a the equivalent bathroom remodel. Stay tuned for the next chapter of this mini-series that explains how and why.

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car

This is the second in a 5-part series about how buying a diesel vehicle in 2013 resulted in an electric car and renewable solar panels on our house in 2016. 

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

In 2013 while I was doing vehicle research to replace an aging 2002 Chevrolet Prism, I set several parameters:

Car buyers may start to wonder if they can believe carmakers' claims for emissions level

• Compact vehicle, don't like big cars.
• Small but not cheap.
• A vehicle we could plan to own for a very long time, (I'm talking 20 years). 
• 40+ mpg. 
• I (stubbornly but not wisely) had my mind set on buying a new car (figured this was the one and only time I would do so)
• Price range was not to exceed $30k. 

After 18 months of on and off research and test drives, in March 2013 I bought a VW Golf TDI.

The Golf TDI met all the above requirements, plus it's fun to drive and has a very useful hatchback. Then we learned it's literal dirty secret. VW laid out three options:

• Keep the car and don't get the emissions fixed. Get a check for $5,500, which basically represented the devaluation of the car post-scandal. Not an acceptable option.
• Keep the car and get it fixed. They'd still send us a check for $5,500. Then at some unspecified time in the neari(ish) future, they would install an emissions fix that would likely reduce performance and mileage, and would take up half the small trunk space. Not a great option.
• VW would buy the car back. They offered us $23,000. This is the pre-scandal used car price plus $5,500 for the inconvenience. I thought the offer was fair. We chose to sell it back and use the money to buy another car.

Some might add there is a fourth option, and they'd be right. We could sell the VW back and NOT buy a second car. Jay and I talked about options to go to a one-car family, but we're not quite ready to make that leap.  There are too many things that take each of us in opposite directions, and things like going to the gym, at 5:30 a.m. in the winter is not not going to happen by bike or bus. I think with some serious thought and consideration, and preparing ourselves to make some tradeoffs we could do it down the road. In fact, I think when our 2004 Honda goes, we'll seriously consider it.

For now though, off to the car market we go. Come back for the next entry about the 2016 Chevrolet Volt.

Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins

This is the first in a 5-part series about how buying a diesel vehicle in 2013 resulted in an electric car and renewable solar panels on our house in 2016. 

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

2013 was a big year for me. Jay and I bought our first home together. I got a new hip. I turned 42, which for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans IS significant). And after a year and a half of research, more than a dozen test drives and lots of talking with people, Jay and I bought a Volkswagen Golf TDI. It's a diesel, EPA 40 mpg and on long trips we get close to 42-43. The big deal about this car is that VW promoted this as a "clean diesel" that got good MPG, very nice performance and clean emissions, something that hadn't been available in a consumer vehicle.

I bought a new 2013 VW Golf TDI thinking I'd keep it for20 years. 
Now we're figuring out what to replace it with.

Then last September the truth came out - VW lied. They had rigged the software in their engines to fib about the emissions when the car was being tested, but then programmed to burn inefficiently when running, releasing 40 times the nitrous oxide than the EPA allows. Not 4 times, not 10 times, 40 times. They said they were sorry. They sent us a $500 Visa gift card for Christmas. And last month, they offered to buy the car back. Since our vehicle is relatively new (a 2013) and only has 40,000 miles, we got a fair buyback offer and we took it.

Sometime this November, at the same VW dealership where we bought the car, we'll sell it back to them. They'll send a check to pay off the loan to the bank and give us a check for the difference. And then, we'll have a decision to make. Buy another car? Keep the windfall? 

We decided to make lemonade, a lot of lemonade, out of this literal lemon. I'll let you know how tasty it is in another blog entry. 

Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins

This is the first in a 5-part series about how buying a diesel vehicle in 2013 resulted in an electric car and renewable solar panels on our house in 2016. 

If you'd like to read all the parts of this series, you can see them here.
Part 1 - How Volkswagen is Helping us Repay the Planet for Its Sins
Part 2 - Our Search for a Cleaner Car
Part 3 - Buying a Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt
Part 4 - A Lesson on Creating Clean Energy at Home
Part 5 - Making the Decision to Add Solar to our Urban Roof

2013 was a big year for me. Jay and I bought our first home together. I got a new hip. I turned 42, which for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans IS significant). And after a year and a half of research, more than a dozen test drives and lots of talking with people, Jay and I bought a Volkswagen Golf TDI. It's a diesel, EPA 40 mpg and on long trips we get close to 42-43. The big deal about this car is that VW promoted this as a "clean diesel" that got good MPG, very nice performance and clean emissions, something that hadn't been available in a consumer vehicle.

I bought a new 2013 VW Golf TDI thinking I'd keep it for20 years. Now we're figuring out what to replace it with.

Then last September the truth came out - VW lied. They had rigged the software in their engines to fib about the emissions when the car was being tested, but then programmed to burn inefficiently when running, releasing 40 times the nitrous oxide than the EPA allows. Not 4 times, not 10 times, 40 times. They said they were sorry. They sent us a $500 Visa gift card for Christmas. And last month, they offered to buy the car back. Since our vehicle is relatively new (a 2013) and only has 40,000 miles, we got a fair buyback offer and we took it.

Sometime this November, at the same VW dealership where we bought the car, we'll sell it back to them. They'll send a check to pay off the loan to the bank and give us a check for the difference. And then, we'll have a decision to make. Buy another car? Keep the windfall? 

We decided to make lemonade, a lot of lemonade, out of this literal lemon. I'll let you know how tasty it is in another blog entry. 

Chicken Drives Around Our Back Yard

Since about Day 2 of having chickens, the idea of a chicken tractor has always intrigued me. Chicken tractor? First, take any notion of 4-wheeled farm machinery out of your head. Replace it instead with a lightweight, rectangular enclosure, covered with netting and a tarp and two wheels on one end that is the daytime playground for a small flock of chickens. 

The idea is that the tractor is moved around the yard where the chickens eat grass and bugs, poop a bit and enjoy the outdoors while staying put in the yard and protected from overhead hawk attacks. Because the chickens do eat a lot of the vegetation and scratch at the grass, the tractor needs to be moved daily so they don't destroy the lawn. Thus, each day they are fed, fertilize and mow the lawn, are exposed to the sun and have something new and interesting to do each day. Chickens, like any creature, need diversion as well.

Our flock of five in their new tractor.

By virtue of being lightweight, the tractor is fundamentally NOT ground-predator proof. A racoon, possum, ferret, fox or any other carnivorous predator could easily break into the tractor's light netting to have chicken dinner. But, since these predators are mostly nocturnal, the tractor is safe for the chickens during the day. Daytime predators include hawks, and the netting and tarp prevent raptor attacks. This means that the girls have to be moved (lured, cajoled, chased, treated and sometimes carried) from their safe night quarters (our chicken coop) to the tractor each morning and in the evening, they need to be moved (exhorted, wheedled, tantalize, treated and sometimes carried) back to the coop. 

As I designed the tractor, I wanted it to have multiple uses. In permaculture terms, this is called stacking functions, where the same object can be used for many purposes (functions).

The first function is obvious: the tractor provides an alternate place for the chickens to spend the day, which offers greens and bugs to eat. We have a long, narrow run along the side of our house and in the spring it's rich with weedy vegetation. But it doesn't take them long to mow it down to nothing but dirt, thistles and mint, which they don't seem to care for.

The next function is that chickens mow the grass. Literally, we don't have to mow the lawn any more. The 5'x8' size is large enough to travel around the entire yard in about two weeks, and small enough that the five chickens clip the grass down in one day.

One day of the chickens "mowing" the lawn. It's pretty obvious, you might even says shocking. But the
grass seems to bounce back very quickly after a one-day chicken clip.

But I wanted even more stacking functions (multiple uses) than lawn mowing and grass food for the chickens. One of the things I've always wanted to do was confine the chickens to our raised garden beds after the harvest, where they would eat fallen fruit and bugs, scratch the soil and deposit their poo exactly where we want it. So I built the chicken tractor to the same dimensions of our garden beds: 5 feet wide and 8 feet long. Our beds are 16 feet long, so this will be easy to set on the bed sides and move from bed to bed, allowing the chickens to do what chickens do best, make a mess while enclosed in their tractor.

But there were possibilities for yet more stacking functions. I reused a lot of materials that I had around the house, garage and garden. In fact, all I had to buy were three 2x4 boards (two 8-foot boards and one 10-foot board that I cut in half), and hardware such as hinges, latches and screws. With that, I made the tractor out of hoop house materials I had on hand. When the chickens move into their coop for the winter, I'll remove the tractor's nest box and shade tarp, throw some plastic over the hoops and plant spinach under it in October or November. Under that hoop house the spinach will germinate and grow, then stall in the winter, and start again very early in the spring. We'll have March and April spinach, well before our CSA will start delivering springtime greens.


AND, because I LOVE stacking functions, I won't plant spinach in one corner of the hoop house. In the winter I will start seeds in the basement under grow lights. In March or early April, I move them to a low hoop house next to the house where I keep extra watch on them, and heat as necessary with seedling mats. Once the weather moderates and the plants are heartier, but not ready to be planted, and have outgrown the low hoop house, I'll move them to this larger, taller hoop to harden off and get big before the chickens occupy it again in late spring.

The Last Day of Marge's Garden

When Jay and I moved into our Madison east side neighborhood and I started to build an orchard in our front yard, several people told me about Marge's garden, an illicit, stealth, guerrilla garden on public land, supposedly very near our block. For several years I looked in the general direction that people told me or pointed toward, but I never saw this Brigadoon of a garden. One morning while waiting for the Enterprise car rental office to open (also JUST down the street from our house), I walked behind the building to do a more thorough examination of the area where people told me the house was. You can read more about my discovery.

In late August, as my nieces, nephew and I walked to a beach on Lake Monona, I noticed a bulldozer and several City of Madison workers leveling Marge's garden. They knocked down the field of walking onions, flattened the raised beds and picked through the dirt to remove all the figurines, pots, and rotted wood that had once served as Marge's furniture, garden borders, etc. My nieces and nephew were indifferent—they didn’t have any attachment to the place, but I stopped to take a quick snapshot of the project. 

My nieces and nephew were beach bound -
but I took a moment to reflect on the end of Marge's Garden.

I was saddened by the destruction of the garden. It felt like we hadn't given it a proper goodbye. Ideally, some people might have gathered to remember Marge, maybe take one of the pots, or figurines, or a walking onion for their garden, and then let the City workers flatten it. I'm not saying that it didn't need to go. Trees had grown up and mostly shaded the garden, no one was caring for it, and it won't be long before the Public Market District takes its place. 

No, all I am saying is that I would have liked to say goodbye to it before the bulldozers erased its existence, and maybe, just maybe, we could have gotten some interest in a little plaque. You know, one of those historical plaques stuck to a nice granite stone that said something like this:

In the late 20th Century, Marge started a guerrilla garden here, growing food where there was nothing more than turf. Tucked between the City of Madison Fleet Services building and a wastewater pumping station, for years no one noticed or everyone looked away and no harm was done, but much food was grown. We remember Marge and her many years of illicit and innocent gardening and those inspired by her.