Other cars do preconditioning now too so I dunno if thats still a Tesla only thing. It does help as optimal battery temperature gives you a remarkably higher charge speed…
Yeah—the Taycan did this as it navigated to chargers, IIRC. Pretty useful. Could get coffee, get a solid poop in and not have to wait much longer if at all.
Just like the world having agreed upon black for diesel and green for unleaded nozzles?
If you're chuckin' a hot dog down a hallway, you've got the wrong nozzle.
narf bringing out the pro-PAIN and pro-PAIN accessories
~~~~~~~
Meanwhile, in Texas:
The power grid's holding up okaaaaay so far, but uhhh, that's a concerning predicted dip:
Aaaaaand that reduced capacity line is likely in response to this:
Deja vu, here we go and this isn't even as severe a storm as last time. The only thing everyone in Texas could agree needed to be fixed—the frickin' power grid—was not. They'd rather ban books, make it harder to vote and micromanage our healthcare decisions than meaningfully fix the ONE thing we all agreed needed fixing after hundreds of needless deaths (if not
more).
Peak demand per ERCOT (our power grid folks, where that chart comes from) is forecasted to be
over 70 gigawatts Friday morning, with last February's deadly week-long storm being the only time there's ever been more demand. So uh, let's hope that capacity line doesn't drop too much more.
Talking to a friend in oil and gas, it's a bit more complicated to winterize gas infrastructure here because they also have to withstand triple-digit-Fahrenheit heat in the summer. A lot of facilities winterized regardless, but the state didn't actually set any standards for what "winterization" should be. An
independent investigation found that only 41% of natural gas power facilities had actually gone to the trouble to test their winterization efforts out successfully, which is a far cry from the "98% winterized" figure the state government likes to trot out. (Our government?! Lying to us? Par for the course at this point.)
So, that's all the more reason we should tie into a nationwide power grid that has infrastructure already built to withstand the more extreme winter weather here and to encourage a variety of energy sources to make things more robust when one struggles with the conditions. I'm sure they'd be glad to lean on our producers when facilities further north can't cope with extreme summer heat or other issues, too. But no,
windmills are evil despite having
fewer issues than natural gas in the cold, and we should be
willing to freeze to death for our independence from federal regulation that ensures better-functioning power grids, according to our state's dumbest, cruelest politicians.
...
Can central Texas just secede from this madhouse yet? And take Houston with us? We'll run an extension cord to Oklahoma and leave Greg Abbott up there while we're plugging in to a reliable grid.