The Environmental Impact of Home Backup Generators

I was pretty shocked to see that these things are burning you know one to three gallons an hour in that range depending on you know half load full load if you're running in a 10 to 20 kilowatt uh generator again pricing on this is going to be in the five to ten thousand dollar range so let's just say two gallons an hour for 24 hours a day for seven days a week there are 5.72 kilograms of co2 per gallon burned which gives us about two tons uh two metric tons i know the units are messier two metric tons of carbon dioxide per week running this generator so to give you some context for that uh volvo recently published a very cool study looking at the environmental impact of building their own cars and they said to produce the volvo xc40 recharge which is about a 78 kilowatt hour electric car it's 26 tons of co2 to produce now seven tons of that are for creating that battery so if you think about this if you have a generator that's producing two tons of co2 per week then in four weeks you've already created more emissions than creating a massive nearly 80 kilowatt hour battery of running that backup so i was actually pretty surprised how much emissions how much fuel these backup generators home generators actually use and i started thinking about it was like does this math actually check out if you look at a car a car that's just sitting there idling uses about a third to a half of a gallon per hour you know that's just an engine trying to keep itself running and a few on-board electronics right that's how much fuel it's using and you know gasoline is more energy dense than propane uh and so you know one to three gallons an hour for something that's powering your home all the electronics all the things going on uh starting to actually check out so yeah generators use a ton of fuel create a ton of emissions if you're actually running them for a long period of time if it's once a year you know it's not going to be a huge deal if it's just a day but if you're running these for extended periods of time yeah like fairly quickly they can offset a full you know massive car battery so that's pretty wild

Now for anyone who's left listening and they're thinking to themselves but i want a cheap solution that isn't going to destroy the planet well you're actually in luck hopefully in the near future so there are companies like walbox that are creating chargers that operate both directions so you can use this charger to charge up your electric car and then you can use your electric car to power your home vehicle to home and these chargers are about four thousand dollars and then you also need to have an electric car now i did a search on autotempest.com and you can search for any car here which brings together the listings from all the major used car sites i did a search for electric cars and as you can see there are options in the 5 000 to 6 000 range for a used nissan leaf and with surprisingly low miles even a ford focus electric i forgot about that thing anyways if you're in the market to buy a car autotempest.com is genuinely the first place i start searching because it compiles so many results so hopefully in the near future we have you know multiple evs out there many evs that are compatible with these types of chargers and it's not this thing where we have to have all this you know complicated mess to dig through in order to figure out hey i just want to back up my home and i have all this energy sitting in my electric car hopefully we have real solutions for that in the near future it's very cool to me to have something that serves a dual purpose so having an electric car that can back up your home rather than having to invest in a generator or you know a giant battery pack using something that you already have i think that's very cool

The F-150 Lightning Pro: An Amazing Deal

The other main point of this video is just that the f-150 lightning pro is an amazing deal and it's a truck i i don't quite understand how ford's able to sell it at this price and so i feel like it might be very difficult to acquire these trucks at this price or that price is going to change but either way at the current time especially looking at cost per kilowatt hour these ford f-150 lightning pros are an incredible deal

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video a subject i think many americans are down to get behind don't buy a tesla powerwall instead buy a truck now a portion of this video is sponsored by autotempest we'll get more into that later but know that if you're in the market to buy a car autotempest.com is a great place to start so in this video i want to compare the ford f-150 lightning which can serve as a backup power source for your home i believe it's the first electric vehicle to offer this in the united states and we're going to compare that versus the tesla powerwall which is of course another way that you could have a backup power source for your home so first let's just look at price the f-150 lightning pro starts at forty one thousand six hundred sixty nine dollars versus a tesla power wall if you buy them in multiples they're seventy five hundred dollars each so if you just buy one it's a bit over ten thousand dollars but if you're buying several of them you can get them for 7 500 each okay so how much energy do we have stored in each of these so the f-150 lightning pro has a 98 kilowatt hour battery and the tesla power walls are 14 kilowatt hours 13.5 of which you can use for backup power energy now this of course leads to an interesting comparison so how many power walls do we need to have the equivalent capacity of a ford f-150 lightning pro well that would be 98 divided by 14 that gives us seven power walls how much do seven power walls cost we'll multiply it by 7 500 52 500 so just the battery storage capacity alone in power walls is more expensive than buying a whole truck that is also holding that much battery that you could use to back up your home now i don't have incentives included in these prices and for the purposes of this video we're just going to use the prices that the manufacturers set because incentives can depend on your situation so we're just going to use manufacturer set prices now i'm not saying that everyone is going to go and buy seven powerwalls for their home but if they were they'd be absolutely crazy to do so when you could have an entire truck for less money that's also a truck and so the interesting thing about just how well priced this f-150 pro is which consumers can buy is if you look at the next battery size up so they do have an extended battery pack which gives you 131 kilowatt hours and they only offer that in the pro version for fleet customers so if you're a random consumer out there and you want to buy an f-150 with the 131 kilowatt hour battery pack the price tag is wow 74 169 so going for the extended version uh not exactly going to save you any money out there so that seems silly but it shows just how well priced this f-150 pro is and keep in mind like this is a very useful truck it has all-wheel drive it has 775 pound-feet of torque it's a very capable truck in its base trim so the wild thing to me here is how many kilowatt hours you get for the dollar spent so i plotted the cost per kilowatt hour of every electric vehicle that's on sale today i did exclude some of the more expensive ones that didn't make any sense to put into this comparison but looking at the vast majority of the electric cars out there sold today the ford f-150 lightning pro is all by itself in the cost per kilowatt hour at about 425 dollars per kilowatt hour of that battery pack so you know the closest next thing is the chevy bolt and you know this is significantly uh more vehicle than the chevy bolt so it's pretty wild the price point here i'm not exactly sure how ford's doing that but they're in their own league as far as pricing is concerned so let's touch on the advantages of going either route so if you go with the f-150 well you get a truck included like that's pretty cool right you can do all the truck things with the truck uh you have that huge cost per kilowatt hour advantage you can drive to recharge it say you know there's a power outage it lasts two days you can drive your truck to a charging station assuming that charging station still has power recharge bring your truck back and then keep powering your home you of course don't have that option with a tesla powerwall uh your output for this system from the truck to your house is 9.6 kilowatts that's pretty good pretty high amount of power draw and you can go days without power so as far as calculating how much we'll get into that in a moment but starting with our advantages of our powerwall it's modular you don't have to buy seven of these things right you could just buy three now the disadvantage there is if you're just buying three you're going to be spending about 25 grand you're getting pretty close to this price and you don't have that much time that you actually back up your home when you start getting into the math behind it i think the huge advantage with the tesla power wall is the more of them you get you can exceed that 9.6 kilowatt uh that the ford f-150 is limited so if you're running all kinds of electric appliances within your home like a bunch then you can do that if you have several power walls whereas you may be limited in what you can run with the f-150 so how much time will this f-150 with a 98 kilowatt hour battery pack last you in a power outage well look at your own power bill i looked at mine i use about 20 kilowatt hours per day and that includes charging my tesla so that is including you know having an electric car you can drive around in and so i if you have a 98 kilowatt hour battery pack you divide that by 20. that gives you about five days now let's just call it three days and consider that we were going to have some inefficiencies with this system of sending power back into your home and also leaving you a buffer to drive around so you can still take that truck perhaps to a charger that is nearby or if you need to get groceries things like that you still want to have some usable energy to drive so for me it would be a good three days of doing everything like normal in my home that's pretty cool of course if i was looking at tesla power walls i would need at least two power walls just to last one day now there are some things to note about ford's solution here there are certain requirements in order to have this ford lightning actually be the backup source for your home so first of all you have to have a 320 amp service uh that is pretty high so it might mean a lot of people are going to have to upgrade their electrical service box uh to a 320 amp service versus a 200 so kind of a bummer to see i wish they would offer it with a 200 amp though because this is an 80 amp charger which is also required if you think about that on a 200 amp system that's already using half of your total input to go towards just charging this truck so that charger is required uh though it does come included with the extended battery so if you happen to spend seventy four thousand dollars on an electric truck wow ford will throw in that charger for free what a deal for the other people you're going to have to buy if you're just getting this pro you're going to have to buy that charger separately you also have to buy a home integration system so you can connect all this to your home setup and make it work with your local grid and then you're also going to have to pay for installation which is handled by sunrun assuming you're not going to diy this so it's not as simple as you just buy a ford truck and it works now i do think there are some good reasons to buy a tesla powerwall and i think that makes sense in the case of using tesla solar so if you have tesla solar panels stuck up on your roof and you're driving to work and your solar panels are producing all this excess energy during the day while it's sunny and nice and you're not at home well then it makes sense to have somewhere where you can store that energy so in that case to me it makes sense to have a power wall this gives you energy independence i think the idea of tesla solar is really cool solar panels in general very cool and the big advantage tesla has is their price versus everybody else it just seems like from a pricing standpoint tesla comes in well below everybody else on total system costs for getting a solar system set up on your home now the disadvantages i've actually looked into getting tesla solar from my house i think it'd be really cool the problem is a lot of people complain about the service uh it's kind of the same story with their cars unfortunately so a lot of people have had real struggles with their service and that's kind of held me back also it's location dependent you know not everyone has tons of sun all year round and then also it is expensive i mean if you're looking at putting in one of these systems it's probably going to be in the 30 to 50 000 range again before incentives incentives can bring that down dramatically but it is an expensive solution a couple other things worth pointing out you can buy solar with or without the power wall so in the case that hey you're away from home and you're making excess energy depending on where you live you could be selling that energy back to the grid on making money off your solar panels so that is one thing that could happen another thing to note is that you can buy this power wall separately tesla says through a licensed tesla installer all right so let's be realistic for a moment these are expensive solutions right 30 to 50 grand for a solar system you know 40 grand for a truck could be you know 20 some grand get a powerwall set up so realistically hey i just want a cheap solution for my home that gives me backup power what should i do well then i looked at generators you know you can get a whole home generator uh installed that's making you know 10 to 20 kilowatts power for your home uh in the in the five to ten thousand dollar range and you know if you're running off the city's supplied natural gas that thing just runs as long as you need it right or you can do propane if you want to be self-sufficient so the question i had and i'm sure it's not a question that many people had but i was curious what are the actual emissions from a home generator and i thought you know if this is just something that turns on you know once every year for a few days how much emissions could it possibly produce i was surprised actually how bad they are they use quite a bit of fuel i was pretty shocked to see that and it kind of makes sense once you run the math but essentially these things are burning you know one to three gallons an hour in that range depending on you know half load full load if you're running in a 10 to 20 kilowatt uh generator again pricing on this is going to be in the five to ten thousand dollar range so let's just say two gallons an hour for 24 hours a day for seven days let's say we lost power for a week what are our emissions for that week that we lost power uh we're running propane two gallons an hour 24 hours a day seven days a week there are 5.72 kilograms of co2 per gallon burned which gives us about two tons uh two metric tons i know the units are messier two metric tons of carbon dioxide per week running this generator so to give you some context for that uh volvo recently published a very cool study looking at the environmental impact of building their own cars and they said to produce the volvo xc40 recharge which is about a 78 kilowatt hour electric car it's 26 tons of co2 to produce now seven tons of that are for creating that battery so if you think about this if you have a generator that's producing two tons of co2 per week then in four weeks you've already created more emissions than creating a massive nearly 80 kilowatt hour battery of running that backup so i was actually pretty surprised how much emissions how much fuel these backup generators home generators actually use and i started thinking about it was like does this math actually check out if you look at a car a car that's just sitting there idling uses about a third to a half of a gallon per hour you know that's just an engine trying to keep itself running and a few on-board electronics right that's how much fuel it's using and you know gasoline is more energy dense than propane uh and so you know one to three gallons an hour for something that's powering your home all the electronics all the things going on uh starting to actually check out so yeah generators use a ton of fuel create a ton of emissions if you're actually running them for a long period of time if it's once a year you know it's not going to be a huge deal if it's just a day but if you're running these for extended periods of time yeah like fairly quickly they can offset a full you know massive car battery so that's pretty wild now for anyone who's left listening and they're thinking to themselves but i want a cheap solution that isn't going to destroy the planet well you're actually in luck hopefully in the near future so there are companies like walbox that are creating chargers that operate both directions so you can use this charger to charge up your electric car and then you can use your electric car to power your home vehicle to home and these chargers are about four thousand dollars and then you also need to have an electric car now i did a search on autotempest.com and you can search for any car here which brings together the listings from all the major used car sites i did a search for electric cars and as you can see there are options in the 5 000 to 6 000 range for a used nissan leaf and with surprisingly low miles even a ford focus electric i forgot about that thing anyways if you're in the market to buy a car autotempest.com is genuinely the first place i start searching because it compiles so many results so hopefully in the near future we have you know multiple evs out there many evs that are compatible with these types of chargers and it's not this thing where we have to have all this you know complicated mess to dig through in order to figure out hey i just want to back up my home and i have all this energy sitting in my electric car hopefully we have real solutions for that in the near future it's very cool to me to have something that serves a dual purpose so having an electric car that can back up your home rather than having to invest in a generator or you know a giant battery pack using something that you already have i think that's very cool the other main point of this video is just that the f-150 lightning pro is an amazing deal and it's a truck i i don't quite understand how ford's able to sell it at this price and so i feel like it might be very difficult to acquire these trucks at this price or that price is going to change but either way at the current time especially looking at cost per kilowatt hour these ford f-150 lightning pros are an incredible deal thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them belowhello everyone and welcome in this video a subject i think many americans are down to get behind don't buy a tesla powerwall instead buy a truck now a portion of this video is sponsored by autotempest we'll get more into that later but know that if you're in the market to buy a car autotempest.com is a great place to start so in this video i want to compare the ford f-150 lightning which can serve as a backup power source for your home i believe it's the first electric vehicle to offer this in the united states and we're going to compare that versus the tesla powerwall which is of course another way that you could have a backup power source for your home so first let's just look at price the f-150 lightning pro starts at forty one thousand six hundred sixty nine dollars versus a tesla power wall if you buy them in multiples they're seventy five hundred dollars each so if you just buy one it's a bit over ten thousand dollars but if you're buying several of them you can get them for 7 500 each okay so how much energy do we have stored in each of these so the f-150 lightning pro has a 98 kilowatt hour battery and the tesla power walls are 14 kilowatt hours 13.5 of which you can use for backup power energy now this of course leads to an interesting comparison so how many power walls do we need to have the equivalent capacity of a ford f-150 lightning pro well that would be 98 divided by 14 that gives us seven power walls how much do seven power walls cost we'll multiply it by 7 500 52 500 so just the battery storage capacity alone in power walls is more expensive than buying a whole truck that is also holding that much battery that you could use to back up your home now i don't have incentives included in these prices and for the purposes of this video we're just going to use the prices that the manufacturers set because incentives can depend on your situation so we're just going to use manufacturer set prices now i'm not saying that everyone is going to go and buy seven powerwalls for their home but if they were they'd be absolutely crazy to do so when you could have an entire truck for less money that's also a truck and so the interesting thing about just how well priced this f-150 pro is which consumers can buy is if you look at the next battery size up so they do have an extended battery pack which gives you 131 kilowatt hours and they only offer that in the pro version for fleet customers so if you're a random consumer out there and you want to buy an f-150 with the 131 kilowatt hour battery pack the price tag is wow 74 169 so going for the extended version uh not exactly going to save you any money out there so that seems silly but it shows just how well priced this f-150 pro is and keep in mind like this is a very useful truck it has all-wheel drive it has 775 pound-feet of torque it's a very capable truck in its base trim so the wild thing to me here is how many kilowatt hours you get for the dollar spent so i plotted the cost per kilowatt hour of every electric vehicle that's on sale today i did exclude some of the more expensive ones that didn't make any sense to put into this comparison but looking at the vast majority of the electric cars out there sold today the ford f-150 lightning pro is all by itself in the cost per kilowatt hour at about 425 dollars per kilowatt hour of that battery pack so you know the closest next thing is the chevy bolt and you know this is significantly uh more vehicle than the chevy bolt so it's pretty wild the price point here i'm not exactly sure how ford's doing that but they're in their own league as far as pricing is concerned so let's touch on the advantages of going either route so if you go with the f-150 well you get a truck included like that's pretty cool right you can do all the truck things with the truck uh you have that huge cost per kilowatt hour advantage you can drive to recharge it say you know there's a power outage it lasts two days you can drive your truck to a charging station assuming that charging station still has power recharge bring your truck back and then keep powering your home you of course don't have that option with a tesla powerwall uh your output for this system from the truck to your house is 9.6 kilowatts that's pretty good pretty high amount of power draw and you can go days without power so as far as calculating how much we'll get into that in a moment but starting with our advantages of our powerwall it's modular you don't have to buy seven of these things right you could just buy three now the disadvantage there is if you're just buying three you're going to be spending about 25 grand you're getting pretty close to this price and you don't have that much time that you actually back up your home when you start getting into the math behind it i think the huge advantage with the tesla power wall is the more of them you get you can exceed that 9.6 kilowatt uh that the ford f-150 is limited so if you're running all kinds of electric appliances within your home like a bunch then you can do that if you have several power walls whereas you may be limited in what you can run with the f-150 so how much time will this f-150 with a 98 kilowatt hour battery pack last you in a power outage well look at your own power bill i looked at mine i use about 20 kilowatt hours per day and that includes charging my tesla so that is including you know having an electric car you can drive around in and so i if you have a 98 kilowatt hour battery pack you divide that by 20. that gives you about five days now let's just call it three days and consider that we were going to have some inefficiencies with this system of sending power back into your home and also leaving you a buffer to drive around so you can still take that truck perhaps to a charger that is nearby or if you need to get groceries things like that you still want to have some usable energy to drive so for me it would be a good three days of doing everything like normal in my home that's pretty cool of course if i was looking at tesla power walls i would need at least two power walls just to last one day now there are some things to note about ford's solution here there are certain requirements in order to have this ford lightning actually be the backup source for your home so first of all you have to have a 320 amp service uh that is pretty high so it might mean a lot of people are going to have to upgrade their electrical service box uh to a 320 amp service versus a 200 so kind of a bummer to see i wish they would offer it with a 200 amp though because this is an 80 amp charger which is also required if you think about that on a 200 amp system that's already using half of your total input to go towards just charging this truck so that charger is required uh though it does come included with the extended battery so if you happen to spend seventy four thousand dollars on an electric truck wow ford will throw in that charger for free what a deal for the other people you're going to have to buy if you're just getting this pro you're going to have to buy that charger separately you also have to buy a home integration system so you can connect all this to your home setup and make it work with your local grid and then you're also going to have to pay for installation which is handled by sunrun assuming you're not going to diy this so it's not as simple as you just buy a ford truck and it works now i do think there are some good reasons to buy a tesla powerwall and i think that makes sense in the case of using tesla solar so if you have tesla solar panels stuck up on your roof and you're driving to work and your solar panels are producing all this excess energy during the day while it's sunny and nice and you're not at home well then it makes sense to have somewhere where you can store that energy so in that case to me it makes sense to have a power wall this gives you energy independence i think the idea of tesla solar is really cool solar panels in general very cool and the big advantage tesla has is their price versus everybody else it just seems like from a pricing standpoint tesla comes in well below everybody else on total system costs for getting a solar system set up on your home now the disadvantages i've actually looked into getting tesla solar from my house i think it'd be really cool the problem is a lot of people complain about the service uh it's kind of the same story with their cars unfortunately so a lot of people have had real struggles with their service and that's kind of held me back also it's location dependent you know not everyone has tons of sun all year round and then also it is expensive i mean if you're looking at putting in one of these systems it's probably going to be in the 30 to 50 000 range again before incentives incentives can bring that down dramatically but it is an expensive solution a couple other things worth pointing out you can buy solar with or without the power wall so in the case that hey you're away from home and you're making excess energy depending on where you live you could be selling that energy back to the grid on making money off your solar panels so that is one thing that could happen another thing to note is that you can buy this power wall separately tesla says through a licensed tesla installer all right so let's be realistic for a moment these are expensive solutions right 30 to 50 grand for a solar system you know 40 grand for a truck could be you know 20 some grand get a powerwall set up so realistically hey i just want a cheap solution for my home that gives me backup power what should i do well then i looked at generators you know you can get a whole home generator uh installed that's making you know 10 to 20 kilowatts power for your home uh in the in the five to ten thousand dollar range and you know if you're running off the city's supplied natural gas that thing just runs as long as you need it right or you can do propane if you want to be self-sufficient so the question i had and i'm sure it's not a question that many people had but i was curious what are the actual emissions from a home generator and i thought you know if this is just something that turns on you know once every year for a few days how much emissions could it possibly produce i was surprised actually how bad they are they use quite a bit of fuel i was pretty shocked to see that and it kind of makes sense once you run the math but essentially these things are burning you know one to three gallons an hour in that range depending on you know half load full load if you're running in a 10 to 20 kilowatt uh generator again pricing on this is going to be in the five to ten thousand dollar range so let's just say two gallons an hour for 24 hours a day for seven days let's say we lost power for a week what are our emissions for that week that we lost power uh we're running propane two gallons an hour 24 hours a day seven days a week there are 5.72 kilograms of co2 per gallon burned which gives us about two tons uh two metric tons i know the units are messier two metric tons of carbon dioxide per week running this generator so to give you some context for that uh volvo recently published a very cool study looking at the environmental impact of building their own cars and they said to produce the volvo xc40 recharge which is about a 78 kilowatt hour electric car it's 26 tons of co2 to produce now seven tons of that are for creating that battery so if you think about this if you have a generator that's producing two tons of co2 per week then in four weeks you've already created more emissions than creating a massive nearly 80 kilowatt hour battery of running that backup so i was actually pretty surprised how much emissions how much fuel these backup generators home generators actually use and i started thinking about it was like does this math actually check out if you look at a car a car that's just sitting there idling uses about a third to a half of a gallon per hour you know that's just an engine trying to keep itself running and a few on-board electronics right that's how much fuel it's using and you know gasoline is more energy dense than propane uh and so you know one to three gallons an hour for something that's powering your home all the electronics all the things going on uh starting to actually check out so yeah generators use a ton of fuel create a ton of emissions if you're actually running them for a long period of time if it's once a year you know it's not going to be a huge deal if it's just a day but if you're running these for extended periods of time yeah like fairly quickly they can offset a full you know massive car battery so that's pretty wild now for anyone who's left listening and they're thinking to themselves but i want a cheap solution that isn't going to destroy the planet well you're actually in luck hopefully in the near future so there are companies like walbox that are creating chargers that operate both directions so you can use this charger to charge up your electric car and then you can use your electric car to power your home vehicle to home and these chargers are about four thousand dollars and then you also need to have an electric car now i did a search on autotempest.com and you can search for any car here which brings together the listings from all the major used car sites i did a search for electric cars and as you can see there are options in the 5 000 to 6 000 range for a used nissan leaf and with surprisingly low miles even a ford focus electric i forgot about that thing anyways if you're in the market to buy a car autotempest.com is genuinely the first place i start searching because it compiles so many results so hopefully in the near future we have you know multiple evs out there many evs that are compatible with these types of chargers and it's not this thing where we have to have all this you know complicated mess to dig through in order to figure out hey i just want to back up my home and i have all this energy sitting in my electric car hopefully we have real solutions for that in the near future it's very cool to me to have something that serves a dual purpose so having an electric car that can back up your home rather than having to invest in a generator or you know a giant battery pack using something that you already have i think that's very cool the other main point of this video is just that the f-150 lightning pro is an amazing deal and it's a truck i i don't quite understand how ford's able to sell it at this price and so i feel like it might be very difficult to acquire these trucks at this price or that price is going to change but either way at the current time especially looking at cost per kilowatt hour these ford f-150 lightning pros are an incredible deal thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below\n"