Thursday, March 14, 2024

Solar Performance is Hot in the New Year, and I Wasn't Alone

The first quarter of the year is nearly over, and just as I thought, EL Niño has produced a relatively warm and sunny winter. And at my house that has been good news on the solar power front.

January saw low performance, which is as expected. But February? It kicked ass. And March is off to a stunningly strong start. 

Performance this February bested the same month last year by a fair amount, as you can see to the left. And while March is only half over, the pace is looking really promising. Last March the system produced 960 kWh. As of today, with 19 days left to go, I'm already at 367 kWh. 

But what's even more interesting is that as of today my production is totaled about 3.6x my rate of consumption. If the days stay sunny — which is a stretch — I could potentially end the month with production at FOUR TIMES consumption. That's kind of mind-boggling. 



Here look at a few more graphs, because why not?


            
It's also been fun looking at the electric meter. On January 1 I happened to photograph. It read 1,315 which was down from a peak of 2,595 I captured on Sept. 15. Yesterday I photographed a reading of 835. That means I've exported more than 1.7 megawatts into the grid since the end of the summer. For context,  last summer I consumed about 2.8 megawatts, most of it from air conditioning and heating the pool, which I did only two or three days. (Summer mornings here can start on the cold side, especially in June.)

But what I'm starting to think is this: If production remains this strong through through May, I may just about offset what I can expect to consume this summer, which is sort of the point of the whole system. I'm might just have that power cushion I was hoping for when I started this project

There are a couple other points to consider: We need a new water heater, and it will be electric, not gas. I'm pretty certain we're going to swap out the cooktop for an induction stove. Both will reduce the gas bill, one by a little the other by a lot. But both will boost our year-round power consumption. I'm still not ready to switch over to an electric vehicle, but that day is coming. And yes I'm still paying off the loan I took out to build the array and install the battery, but the payments are manageable. 

And I'm still a little wary about the production problem I experienced during the first half of last year. But now that it has been solved, 2024 looks to be the year that going solar will really start to pay off. 

And I'm part of a national trend that brings both good news and bad news. (Isn't always a mixed bag?) I read here at Popular Mechanics which surprises me by still being around, that the US power grid added 32.4 gigawatts worth of solar power in 2023, which amounted to 52 percent of all added power capacity. Natural gas came in a distant second, with 16 gigawatts of newly installed capacity. Texas and California added the most solar power of all the states. That's the good news. 

The problem is it's not enough. Today's New York Times led with this story about how demand for electrical power is growing so fast, that even all that new capacity I just mentioned isn't proving to be enough. 

Consider this: Electrical utilities have doubled their estimates for the amount of power they'll have to supply by 2028 — four years from now. The demand, The Times says, is driven by electric vehicles, data centers — and get this — factories building batteries and solar panels.

And so what are those utilities proposing to do? Build more natural gas generating capacity, and in some cases keep some coal plants running longer than previously planned. And if that becomes reality, all hope of meeting America's climate change goals by 2035 are finished. There's no way, apparently, to grow sustainable power alternatives fast enough to both meet the growing demand and meet the climate goals. It's going to be a tough slog to get through the next decade and hit those targets. 

Even so, there's still some good news left on the table, but it's more geopolitical than climate-friendly. A report by the investment bank JP Morgan estimates that the US last year achieved energy independence, meaning as a nation we exported power energy than we imported. There's a good summary here and you can read the full JP Morgan report here. I haven't read it yet, but will get through it in the coming days.

Onward!

Saturday, January 13, 2024

How My First Full Year With Solar Panels Worked Out

My first full calendar year with the panels is in the books, and if nothing else, the numbers tell a mixed tale that emphasizes how important weather cycles are. 

First the top line numbers: The system produced a total of 8.55 MWh against total consumption of 7.82 MWh. Exports were 6.3 MWh, and I exported more power than I took from the grid in February, March, April, August, September, November, and December. 

Put simply, I ended the year having produced almost three-quarters of a megawatt more than I used, overall, and I consumed about 2.5 MWh directly from the panels. (The sum of the blue strips on the graphic to the left. Click to make it bigger.) 

By itself, it's good news, but when you compare it on a month-by-month basis, production was lower in CY23 than in the months of CY22 when the system was live. (Recall it first went live in June of '22.) Only November had higher production year-over-year, and then only by a whisker.

Weather was clearly a factor. It was a wet summer and a wet fall in the Northeast, so it wasn't a surprise that production came in below the prior year which was a pretty dry one, especially in the Hudson Valley.

Another factor was the weird production interference the system experienced from the "bad crimp" that was corrected over the summer

As luck would have it, 2024 is an El Niño year, which implies a warmer and wetter winter than the typical seasonal pattern. I'm not a big fan of snow, but the local creeks and rivers are already close to overflowing, so it would be great to see more sun if only to dry things out. If typical, the La Niña cycle that tends to follow will bring a drier summer, and perhaps a lot of sun with it.

So far the system tells me it has produced more than 16 megawatts in its 18 months of operation, and saved the atmosphere more than 25,000 pounds worth of carbon emissions, which according to SolarEdge, the manufacturer of my inverters, is the same as planting 190 trees. To give me that number it used the methodology created by the US Environmental Protection Agency. In perspective, the carbon savings equate to taking 2.6 gas-powered cars off the road for one year, or 1,292 gallons of gasoline consumed. By that logic, it's at least offsetting some of the gas I consume driving my car, but not all of it. We do drive a lot.

On the billing front, we've now had three billing periods come in with that minimal amount I first saw on my bill in May. So we are saving money, but because of the weird problems the local utility has experienced with its billing system, it's impossible to actually do the math and estimate the savings with any precision. Meanwhile, I'm still paying off the loan I took out to build the system, but it's a relatively painless amount every month. 

And obviously, we're still paying the utility for natural gas to heat our home and make hot water. Still ahead for us are questions about if and how to transition toward non-gas alternatives. I'd like a tankless electric water heater, and I'm curious about geothermal heat pumps, both of which qualify for tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. So while we're off to a good start on reducing our overall carbon footprint, there's a lot more work to do on that front, but it also has to make financial sense. 

Sunday, September 24, 2023

I've Officially Fallen For The Grateful Dead

I can't really explain it, but for some reason, I have spent the better part of two decades avoiding the subject of The Grateful Dead. Until now.

Yes, I've written elsewhere about my musical obsessions, my collecting bootlegs of various artists, namely Van Morrison and Charles Lloyd, and John Lee Hooker. Other notable entrants in my 2-terabytes and change of collected music include Miles Davis, John Prine, Prince, Ray Charles, The Police, The Band, and every single known performance by The Allman Brothers Band in New York City. 

And yet, I had avoided the rabbit hole of The Grateful Dead. 

I knew enough to be curious and thought I had paid the band sufficient attention, enough to decide that its enormous body of work just wasn't for me. Some years back I spent a fair amount of time at The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, New York, aka the site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It was a notable historical and cultural touchstone, and I made a point of working my way through recordings of the many musical acts that graced its stage.

And there's a lot of notable work to consider. Santana's epic Soul Sacrifice is one. The delicate harmonies of Crosby Stills & Nash count as another. The middle of Sly and the Family Stone's set was nothing short of a musical triumph for the ages. And I hate to admit it, but the only reason I know the name Richie Havens is because as a teenager I happened to see his powerful improvisation Freedom on MTV once during an afternoon home sick from school. It would take me years to understand it for what it was. 

This brings us to the Dead's mostly forgettable Woodstock set. I listened to it in full a few times and concluded that if it was representative, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Pigpen's lengthy "Love Light" was a highlight of an otherwise uninteresting performance. It has since been disregarded as an example of a curse that hung over the Dead when it was given chances to play the big late-60s festivals. 

And that is more or less where I left the issue sometime around 2010. I didn't think much about the Grateful Dead again. I did know, however, that Dead had a big hand in contributing to the taping culture that allowed me the chance to amass my massive trove of bootlegs. Every so often I would grab a Dead show from a torrent site in hopes of boosting my sharing ratio. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn't. By all rights, I should have been more interested than I was. What was I missing? 

In 2017 I finally decided to drill down a bit. I watched the six-part 238-minute documentary "Long Strange Trip" on Amazon. I found it fascinating and engaging. And yet I had no connection to the music, so I wasn't watching it as a fan, but a casual, curious observer. The story, not the music, hooked me.


After that, I got increasingly curious about the music, but couldn't find a meaningful way in. I was moved by the story Dennis Leonard, recording engineer on the European tour in 1972 tells in Episode Three about how the song "Morning Dew" ended up as the closing track on the original "Europe '72" album. It's a beautiful anecdote, the kind that biographers dream of. It motivated me to give the track a few listens. It was interesting, but it wasn't enough for me, yet. 



But now I had an album from which to launch my skeptical exploration. And so I listened to "Europe '72" a few times over. I came to really like "China Cat Sunflower" though I was always disappointed when it would segue into "I Know You Rider" because I found myself wanting the guitar groove from "China Cat" to keep going.  I also had some history with the studio version of "Sugar Magnolia." The live version is a lot more interesting, thanks mainly to Keith Godchaux's gorgeous piano work. His wife Donna's infectious vocals add some life to Bob Weir's on the "Sunshine Daydream" section that closes out the tune. ("Sunshine Daydream" would later morph into its own distinct tune.)

Other tracks on the album were harder to like. "Cumberland Blues," "You Win Again" and "Tennessee Jed" felt like folksy, dated country music trying to be cool. 

Others I found tolerable. Pigpen's "It Hurts Me Too" feels like a standard blues vehicle of the sort he tended to like when he wasn't consuming time and oxygen on "Love Light." Jerry Garcia's vocals on "Ramble on Rose" are kind of catchy. 

Others grew on me like "Jack Straw" and let's face it, "Truckin'." By mid-2018, "Europe '72" had turned into an album I was turning to again and again to power through a tough work day, or to unwind at the end of another. 

I watched that "Long Strange Trip" documentary again, and in 2022, a third time. And each time the story of the Dead became ever more enticing, and the desire to understand the worldwide fascination with the music stood as a challenge. I liked "Europe '72,' but clearly, there was more to it than that. 

It wasn't long before I discovered that there was a "Europe '72 Vol. 2" and again the cycle repeated itself. "Good Lovin'" is an epic jam that I'd play again and again. And the three-track combo of "Not Fade Away" bleeding into "Goin Down the Road Feeling Bad" and then back started making the case for the devotion of the Dead's dynamic and ever-evolving live performances. 

And yet I'd find myself struggling with tracks like "Dark Star" and "The Other One" which required the kind of effort I wasn't yet willing to make as a casual explorer of The Grateful Dead oeuvre. At least not yet. One I actually hated, a song so bad it should be illegal to sing except maybe in the city it's about: "El Paso." Once was too much for me and if there were a court for crimes against musical taste, I'd bring charges and win.

Still, I dug deeper and assigned myself some homework. I decided to listen to the entire "Europe '72" boxed set in its entirety over the course of the summer of 2022. I began to notice how different performances of each tune would evolve over time and learned which ones I liked the best. 

Compare, for example, "China Cat Sunflower" from April 7  then April 11April 16April 17, April 24, then April 26 and April 29 to the definitive version that landed on the original album from Paris on May 3. And yet it would keep evolving after that, significantly through the end of the tour, May 26, by which time it would sound very different, having gone through some very cool contortions on May 10, May 11, May 16, May 18, May 23May 24 and May 25.  

And yes, I literally linked to every version of "China Cat Sunflower" from the 1972 European tour, which is the point. This chronicling of the journey of a song over the course of a particular tour is commonplace among Grateful Dead fans. The attention to detail, like changes in drum arrangements, guitar solos, tempo, and length are all eagerly pored over and examined for flights of creativity and musical choices more than a half-century after being played. 

This kind of madness isn't new, and it didn't start with the Grateful Dead. I'm reminded of the late radio host Phil Schaap and his fervent devotion to the works of the saxophonist Charlie Parker. In a New Yorker profile published in 2008, the writer David Remnick wrote an opening paragraph that any Grateful Dead fan would immediately understand intuitively: Schaap's devotion as expressed by the content of his weekday morning radio program was ....

"...so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of 'Moose the Mooche' and 'Swedish Schnapps.'"

Remnick goes on to explain how Schaap would stand up on the air to lingering criticism that his examinations went too far. "The examination may be tedium to you," he says during a broadcast sometime in 2008, "my bent here is that I want to know when it happened because I believe in listening to the music of a genius chronologically where possible, particularly an improvising artist." The case for examining the work of Charlie Parker applies equally to Jerry Garcia. And in Garcia's case, the corpus of material so much more voluminous.

If we wanted to take the issue under further consideration we could. A website called Gratefulstats claims to track the number and length of every Dead tune in its known history. It says that "China Cat" was played 59 times in 1972, of which 18 occurred on the European tour. It further claims that the band played the song a total of 543 times between 1968 and 1995. Another site, Jerrybase, places the number at 579 and helpfully links to an essay on the evolution of the China>Rider combo, a regular staple of Dead shows, to 1974. 

So you can see where this is going: I'm kind of falling in love. And here is where it has taken me. Two nights ago I played the following two-song combo of "Scarlett Begonias" and "Fire on the Mountain" from a Dead show played at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in the spring of 1977. It is arguably the most famous example of the Grateful Dead approach to musical improvisation, and perhaps even at or near the height of its performing powers. 

I lack the words to properly describe it so I'll borrow a bit from Sadie Sartini Garner who described in a brilliantly researched piece for The Ringer earlier this year:
"The jam that leads “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain” on the May 8, 1977, tape—probably the band’s most famous jam—is mind-boggling at a technical level; there are moments in which all five musicians seem to be playing both songs at once. But it’s no less admirable for the way it sustains a feeling of buoyancy, of pleasant surprise, of a seemingly unlimited number of happily beguiling opportunities around every corner."
I listened as a late-September sun set over my darkening living room, intellectually and emotionally unable to let the music stop for about a half hour. If you're not affected in at least some way by what you hear, it may be that this music isn't for you. I thought the same for a very long time. And yet now I can't stop listening. 







But musically is it really all that important? Is this actually music that will matter to the ages? Garner makes a persuasive case in her piece, which concerned the final tour of Dead & Co. a band made up of one and sometimes more surviving members of the original configuration with some other musicians devoted to the Dead canon:
"In 2023, even the most proficient Beatles tribute acts are working the college bar circuit, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone daring to take up the mantle of the Lennon-McCartney catalog with any credibility once Sir Paul calls it quits. But in 100 years, there will still be bands who are able to tour the country playing Grateful Dead music in new and inventive ways, bringing the old corpses to life once again, and there will be crowds eager to hear them do it."
 
(Photo at top by Chris Stone, taken on October 9, 1980 at The Warfield Theater in San Francisco. Image used via Creative Commons license.)  





Sunday, August 6, 2023

A Weird Period With the Solar System Appears to End Well

I've been quiet about the status of my solar system for a few months now, and there's a good reason for that. Sometime in May, things got weird, and it took until late July to un-weird them, and the result of that process didn't become apparent until, well, today, in early August. 

We entered May feeling optimistic. We'd seen our first power bill charging only for delivery and fees, not grid consumption. At the end of a period with sunny and dry weather, we expected more sun and more days producing more power than consuming, or at least offsetting high consumption from the use of AC and the pool heater. Yet in that same peppy post from May 1, I noticed that production in March was higher than that of April. In hindsight, I should have seen that as a red flag. 

Things got weird in the month of May. Production came in below April and by a lot: 731 kWh versus 865 kWh. That by itself is weird. Days get longer in May, and the weather generally gets sunnier as summer approaches. It really should have been accelerating, not slowing down. I reckoned the weather was a factor: It was an unusually cloudy month for May, with several rainy days in the second half of the month.

I also suspected that perhaps the panels were dirty. The same tree pollen that coated my car with a fine dusty patina appeared also to coat the panels. (You can kind of see it in the picture of the back array at left.) In one funny moment, I took my water compressor and tried to manufacture some "rain" on the front panels. It was fun to try, but it made no difference.

As the month progressed, my concern mounted. I put in a call to our vendor, Kasselman Solar, who sent out a service rep to take a closer look. (She quickly dismissed my theory about the pollen dust.) Communication, it seems, between one of the basement inverters and its home base stuck out right away as an apparent problem. The location of my home has exceptionally bad cellular phone coverage, and the SolarEdge inverter relies on a cellular modem to report its production and output, including its exported power to the utility grid. That old saying "proof or it didn't happen" applies here. If the inverter can't report exported power, I don't get credit for it on my bill, end of story. And those credits are essentially the reason the entire system exists. 

One of the two inverters, it turned out, wasn't communicating at all. It had a faulty comms board, the internal part that talks to the cellular modem. Either the board or the inverter itself would have to be replaced. 

By mid-June, a new inverter had been swapped in and all seemed to be on its way to resolution. Yet as June swung into July, production still didn't rise to a reasonable level. Weather continued to present a challenge. June and the first week or so of July were marked by numerous severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Hudson Valley. I couldn't really expect high production numbers under those conditions. (That dust I had worried about? Totally gone.)

Yet as the weather conditions improved, the needle still didn't move meaningfully. In July of 2022, the first full month of the system's production, the system produced 1.43 mWh. In July of 2023, I produced 732 kWh, or about half the level from the year-ago period. Something was clearly amiss. 

A second service visit from Kasselman revealed the problem: In the technician's argot "One of your strings is down." It meant — I think — that a line connecting some of the panels to the inverter was not working. The source of the problem, it was later revealed, was a "bad crimp," which again I think meant either a faulty component or a poor connection. "Bad crimps happen," he said. Okay then. He and a colleague climbed up on the roof, fixed what had to be fixed, and that was that. Problem solved? Not just yet.

The communication problem was still unsolved and appears as of today to have been more significant than I realized. In parallel to all this I had been struggling with steadily worsening Wi-Fi around the house and had decided to upgrade it. Wherever I live, I make a point to get the fastest Internet connection I have, and so I have a 1-gigabit plan from the local cable company.

But the trio of TP-Link Deco M4 Wi-Fi routers the cable installer had suggested just weren't getting the job done. They seemed overwhelmed by all the connected devices in the house: Three phones, three iPads, a smart TV, smart lights, a connected washer, dryer, dishwasher, oven, and fridge, three always-on computers, network-attached storage, a smart speaker system. You get the idea. 

I went looking for a more robust mesh router system. I turned to Wirecutter, the product review team at The New York Times, and read their reviews of wireless mesh systems and settled on the Asus Zen WiFi AX. I bought a set of two and liked the results. (My cable connection is still wonky, but I'm hoping for an upgrade to fiber optics sometime soonish.)

In anticipation of the second visit from Kasselman's technicians, I bought another set of two. All in the upgrade cost me $700. It seems to have been worth it.

In a conversation with the Kasselman service manager, I learned that the SolarEdge inverters are not approved by the FCC to connect to Wi-Fi, but if a router is close by, a technician can connect it to the Internet via an ethernet cable. This is where the Asus routers made a difference. The main router creates a 5 GHz "backhaul" connection to feed the other Wi-Fi nodes stationed around the house. One of the new routers, I reasoned, if placed in the basement and connected by ethernet, would give that inverter a clear no-excuses connection to report its status. On that second service visit, after the fix on the crimp and the string, I had that fourth router powered up and ready for them to connect to the inverter. Now it's sitting on top of the home battery. Eventually, I'll mount a shelf there. 

Today is the first day that it became clear that we're in a different phase with the solar system. The data connection is working, and SolarEdge has updated its monitoring apps, and the data is just looking different than before. And by different, I mean, better. So much better. 

Last year, the most productive days of the summer peaked at about 60 kWh. This week we've already seen two days with production north of 80 kWh. As I write the sun is setting on the third day this week with production north of 82 kWh, of which more than 40 percent has been exported to the grid. And since temps have been in the mid-70s, our use of the AC has declined, keeping overall consumption down. 

It almost seems like the entire system has been running at less than its full capacity since installation. I'm going to try not to think about all the missed sunlight over the last year, and focus instead on the prospect of improved performance ahead. If this is the new normal for sunny mid-summer days then that is very good news indeed. 

One thing I definitely learned: If you live in an area where cellular coverage is anything less than ideal, do whatever it takes to get a hardwired Internet connection to the inverter. That data link is a lot more important than I ever realized. 

Monday, May 1, 2023

Another Solar Update: The Day We've Been Waiting For

We received our latest power bill from Central Hudson and the day we've been aiming for has finally arrived: We owe nothing for electrical power beyond a flat service fee of $35.10 plus state and local taxes of 83 cents. That's it. 

It shouldn't come as a surprise, and yet it still does. Every few days I take a picture of our meter and pretty much every time since the start of 2023, the number indicating our overall consumption is lower than before. But to see this confirmed on a bill after 10 months with the system in service is terrific validation of the plan we envisioned when we first decided to go solar. 

Here's how the usage graphic appears on the bill, and of course it's not perfect — that "estimate" for August is especially problematic because I know it's wrong. I know from my own data that in the first quarter of the year, net production was more than 113 percent of consumption. And I'm not sure why the bill doesn't display a zero for that period as well. We send photographs of our actual meter readings to the billing office, and I save them. So I can prove that on Jan. 1 the meter read 2104 and that on April 1 it read 1826. So the math shows my net consumption for that period a negative 278 kWh. How the utility arrived at that figure of net consumption of 177 is unclear except that it may have to do with the days on which we submitted our readings. Meter submission days make a difference. I've created a new view in the SolarEdge tracking app to show us detailed production between precise billing dates — the current period ends on June 26 — we'll have a clearer picture of the utility's math. 

Meanwhile, the net consumption figures for the year so far continues to look better every day. (See chart.) As of today net production is 2.85 mWh against consumption of 2.29 mWh or 124 percent. That includes 1.93 mWh of exported power and 0.92 mWh consumed directly from solar. That means the panels directly supplied about 40 percent of our daytime power needs. 

Continuing the trend about which I wrote earlier, the sunny and cold days of February continued through much of March and the first half of April. March turned out to be sunnier and more productive month than April. 

But there's still some big questions lying ahead as we move from spring into summer. The big item: The pool will open in about two weeks and that will bring with it the high power consumption of the electric pool heater. 

Also in June: The system's anniversary date, which is when the utility supposedly credits us for the net billing effect of all the excess power that has been "exported" to its grid. Since the system only operated for about half of last year, we ended 2022 with production-to-consumption ratio of about 80 percent, ie, we consumed more than we produced. My math — and I may be doing it wrong — shows that given last year's abbreviated production and high consumption, has us running behind by more than 2 mWh. So even though we're ahead for calendar 2023 so far, we haven't yet produced more power overall than we've taken from the grid since the beginning.

Here's the math: 

2022 net grid consumption after solar consumption and export: 3.17 mWh
2023 net grid consumption, after exports so far: (1.12) mWh
Difference: 2.05 mWh

In order to build up that summer billing cushion I had been hoping for — the utility calls it a "generation bank" — we have to produce more than 2 full megawatt hours above our consumption by the middle of June. That's a lot. This will of course be an easier exercise next year assuming a repeat of a sunny fall and winter. It also means getting control of consumption during the summer which will be a challenge. I'm contemplating a thermal blanket for the pool to preserve the water's heat and minimize the need for running the heater. For now, here's hoping for some really sunny days in May and June. 

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Digital Security: How I Do Things, Part I

Occasionally someone will ask me how I protect myself online. Usually, the question is superficial, and a superficial answer is expected. But the answer I give rarely is. There are reasons for this. 

For one thing, during my years as a reporter, I had to learn to be careful when communicating with confidential sources. None of them were exactly Deep Throat, but I did take steps to make sure that what they might say in an email or text message exchange was protected. 

Even so, once, during the summer of 2017, my email account was breached by someone using an IP address in South Africa. I could go into detail about why I believe this, but the fact that it happened — and my conclusion may be wrong — shook me.

I thought I had been careful. I had been an early convert to two-factor authentication, and not the weak version involving text messages, but the stronger app-based version. I also used robust passwords and an encrypted password manager.

I resolved after that breach to be a little more paranoid. I started changing my email password as well as a few others at least once a month and doubled down on 2FA everywhere. My worries about that old breach faded, but my paranoia about the next one never did. 

Last summer, I kicked my security posture up a notch. I decided to experiment with hardware security keys from the Swedish company Yubico. It wasn't long before that experiment became a full-scale deployment across my digital footprint and that of my spouse. And the technology is having a moment: Earlier this year, Apple enabled support for hardware keys on its AppleID/iCloud scheme. That got people interested and writing articles about it in the press

Essentially they work like this: When engaged by touching a tiny button after they've been inserted into a USB port, or in some cases held close to a phone or tablet, these keys generate the second code required in two-factor authentication process using the chips in them, and replacing the code, also known as a "one-time password" or OTP that would be texted to you or show up in an authentication app. It can be used to eliminate those inherently less secure approaches to 2FA. There are far more detailed and technical explanations you can find, but that more or less explains it. 

I enabled a set of keys to protect my AppleID. Setting up the first one literally took no longer than the demonstration in this 45-second video. I used two Yubikey 5Cs which cost me $55 each. (Apple smartly requires a minimum of two.) They support NFC or Near-Field Communications protocol, and so when I use it to authenticate to the phone all I have to do is hold it up to the back of the device. One is on my keyring, and another is locked away in case the first one gets lost. For my MacBook Pro I bought a tiny Yubikey 5C Nano  (This one was $65) which sits more or less permanently in a USB-C port. I enabled three keys to start— the first two were already visible on my Mac and iPad Pro — and it took minutes. A few days later I repeated the process for my spouse.




It was more time-consuming to enable all three keys for several other accounts I use that support Yubikey, and there are many. Among them are my Google account, including GMail, Dropbox, Twitter, and Facebook, and even one financial account, but notably not my bank. It also works with Microsoft accounts including Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Office365. It also works with several good password managers, including both 1Password and BitWarden which are the two options I recommend, which aligns with advice from reviewers at The New York Times' Wirecutter

One downside: You will need multiple keys, in case you lose one, so you'll have to spend a touch more than you may like. As I noted above, Apple requires two keys minimum to protect an AppleID. And frankly, you'll want a backup key in case you misplace one. I have two key rings, so between one for each plus the Nano device in my MacBook, and a backup locked in a safe, I ended up actively using four. My wife has three. 

Obviously, no security scheme is perfect, but I think adding hardware-based 2FA to the mix is a significant step, that at first seems like it's going to be complicated, and then it's really not. It's not inconvenient to use the keys to authenticate into a service at all — unless you honestly don't have your key with you, in which case you can still use other 2FA apps like Duo Mobile or Authy in addition.

There are a few other things I do to protect myself online, and I'll share some of those ideas in a future post. 

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Solar Update: It's Not Even April and My Meter Is Running Backward

In my last update on the performance of my solar power system, I had several open questions concerning what to expect during the winter months, and also about what to expect in the new year. Both have been answered in terms that are pretty clear. 


First off, production versus consumption in November continued along the same lines of September and October, though in a somewhat diminished fashion. The system produced 616 kWh against overall consumption of 544 kWh for a ratio of 1.13.

Of that production, I directly consumed 200 kWh, or about 32 percent, directly from solar and exported about 416 kWh to the CenHud grid. The level of production fell from slightly north of 1 mWh in September and 812 kWh in October. 

As you might expect for the season, the trend reversed itself in December and in January. For December I consumed 602 kWh and produced 428 kWh. In January consumption was 592 kWh and production was 396 kWh. And while in both of those months, I consumed more than I produced, they were nevertheless a victory of sorts. I mean who would have expected that I'd produce more than two-thirds of my power from solar during a Hudson Valley winter? 

February reversed the trend once again — I produced 114 percent of what my house consumed that month. And March is on track to repeat that feat, but only higher. As of today, the number is 154 percent.

The explanation is simple. It's been an unusually mild winter, with lots of cold sunny days. Consider the graph below from Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year, when the sun rose at 7:18 AM and set at 4:28 PM. I'd like to show this graph to the doubters who thought I'd never get good solar production in the Northeast.

This brings me to another point about the trend of my power production and consumption for the calendar year. Put simply, production for the full year to date is well ahead of consumption and it's not yet April. As of today, I've produced 1.79 mWh against 1.64 mWh worth of consumption which works out to 109 percent. 

I've been tracking this trend elsewhere via the figures displayed on my net meter. I take a picture of it with my phone and send it on to CenHud every month or so in order to create a reliable record of my consumption and to head off its often inaccurate billing estimates. As luck would have it I took a picture of the meter on Jan. 1 when it was displaying 2104. Today that figure was 1969. That implies that for the calendar year so far I've got a credit of about 135 kWh which given the average price of about 17 cents per watt-hour works out to about $23. 


At first glance that amount isn't much to write home about, but had I consumed the same amount of power without the solar system, I would have owed the power company more than $277 plus delivery fees, which would boost the cost to well above $300. 

I suspect that by the time summer hits that credit will grow considerably. My hope is that it's enough to offset the increase in consumption and cost from running the air conditioner and pool heater.

Another issue has come up: The gas portion of our utility bill remains stubbornly high. I've started wondering if it's worth the effort and investment of replacing the gas cooktop with an electrical induction cooktop. When we remodeled the kitchen last year, we kept the existing gas range in order to keep the project cost under control. Secondly, we're due for a new water heater. I'm thinking tankless electric. 

Meanwhile, there are a few other things I wish I knew: Snow rolls off solar panels really easily and tends to accumulate in greater amounts near the panels than other sections of the roof. The main batch of south-facing panels on the house is mounted above the back deck. At various times of the day and night, we'd hear violent-sounding bumps as sections of snow would melt off and hit the deck or other sections of the roof. The first time times it was a little jarring. Matt Ferrell discussed this and a few other things in his Undecided video series, of which I have become a recent fan. If you're thinking about going solar, you should be a fan too. 

( Graphics are from my SolarEdge dashboard. The sun photo above is by Razvan Dumitrasconiu via Unsplash.)