Before I start this post, Rusty Junior would like to point out that he grew up in a housing trust house, on school card, barely able to afford shoes from Kmart and regular meals. It's not relevant to you, per se, but he feels this is required to alleviate the Weird Guilt™ inherent in writing a post like this. Thanks for your time. As you were.

A few weeks ago our family went all electric. My wife sold her 2018 VW Tiguan (for almost what we paid for it, the used car market in Australia is nuts at the moment!) and took delivery of a Polestar 2, long range, single motor in Magnesium. Having had electric cars for 4+ years now, we knew there'd be no issues with road trips or charging or anything most people ask or worry about, not to mention that we were both excited to never go to a petrol station again. As mentioned in my other posts, the solar and battery system at my house can also charge these cars for free quite easily for about 9 months of the year. For the other 3 (which we are currently in) my wife gets free charging at her work, where they have a GIANT solar installation. So it's renewable, guilt free...and also, well, free!

There are of course a million reviews out there for the Polestar 2. Zeus knows we watched a lot of them before buying one! But I'm not a car reviewer and don't want to bore you trying to become one, so here's some quick observations:

The delivery process in Adelaide was very smooth. The delivery person turned up at the agreed time to our place, and shortly after a truck arrived with the car on it. Sunny, our delivery person, was super friendly and very eager to show us all the bits of the car. So eager in fact that we just let him do his thing, it was a joy to behold.

Compared to my model 3, some things instantly stood out to me. To my eye, the Polestar 2 is just a nicer looking car inside and out. I prefer the lines, I prefer the more "car type" cabin. It also feels better built in a way that's hard to describe. More solid. Tighter tolerances. Just...well...better. It does however feel a bit more cramped because all those screens, consoles and padded areas cut down on the overall visibility. The centre console for example feels quite high and imposing. I guess it's a design feature, but it could have been a bit lower and more subdued. Driving the model 3 feels like you're in a fish tank. Driving the Polestar feels like...well..driving a car. I'd say overall the model 3 is nicer to sit in and admire, while the Polestar is more practical day to day to actually drive and be a passenger in.

Driving wise, both are very planted to the road thanks to their heavy battery packs. I don't really have a preference except to say they are both a joy to drive. I'm also not a car reviewer, so for this bit I'm quite happy to offload you to YouTube for their opinions. That said if you have the means (money, a place to charge it, etc) and haven't gone electric yet...well...you really should! There are a lot more options than there were a few years ago, and for this segment of the market the model 3 and Polestar 2 are my favourites.

Android Automotive (the infotainment system the Polestar runs) is functionally a bit better than Tesla's system. It's a bit uglier, but overall you can do more of what you need to get done as well as install third party apps like Pocket Casts, PlugShare and of course, Spotify. Having the ability to install apps from the Google Play store, straight into your car is very handy. The voice assistant is amazing. It can actually understand me properly, and lets you dictate text messages, navigate and change car settings with ease. The addition of a screen in the driver console section is nice as well. It shows you routing info while navigating, and also important things like speed, etc. It's not a big deal to glance over to my left in the model 3 to see that, but it's nicer to not have to. Why Google (or Polestar) went with the thin icon style design they did though...is a bit beyond me. I don't love that look, but functionality wise it's stellar.

Charging wise the Polestar 2 has the same Type 2 plug almost all cars in Australia have now. With the top bit for AC charging, and a set of DC pins for fast charging. One small pain point: you can charge a Polestar 2 from a gen 3 Tesla wall charger. Some early gen 2 ones also have an internal switch you can flick to do the same. But as you can guess, I had the gen 2 model which they made for about a year that is unable to charge anything that isn't a Tesla. It has the internal switch, but by all accounts it's non functional. So I had to pony up for a newer charger. On the plus side the cable is far thinner now and I also got to move it to a more convenient spot where we can charge both cars in the garage.

Finally, let's talk road trips. If you're new to electric cars my advice here is to take the "WLTP" number quoted on the car makers site, and shave off 20% for city driving, and 30% for highway (100km/h+ speeds). This will vary a bit based on how hard you drive, but it's a good conservative figure to give you an idea of "real world" range. So the model 3 long range claims 600kms, in reality you're going to get 480kms around the city and 420kms at highway speeds. Similarly the Polestar 2 claims 540kms which means 430kms city, 380kms highway. What that means in practice is that there's more than enough range for almost anyone. Sure you can't drive 8 hours non stop, but I'm not entirely sure you should ever do that for safety and comfort reasons. Drive for 2-3 hours, take a break, fast charge for 20 minutes, and keep going.

The elephant in the Australian room is that (at the time of writing this post) Tesla's Supercharging network is much more reliable than other third party systems. That's changing fast, and Tesla might even open their network up to other cars soon, but for the next year or two this will likely still be a fairly big factor in Tesla's favour Down Under. We still plan to road trip in the Polestar 2 (1200km+ trips) but it will require slightly more planning and slightly more vigilance before we leave to make sure all the stations are operational and we pick the correct route. Thankfully the early adopter portion of EV ownership, like planning wineries to stop at that have 3 phase power, is a distant memory. We're in the decent amount of chargers, occasional issues, portion of the adoption curve. I fully expect in 2 years here in Australia those issues will be behind us, so there really has never been a better time to buy an EV...if you can find one shipping here this year. That lack of availability and the price of EVs are two massive issues here in 2022, but that's a whole other blog post.

I haven't updated this site in a bit, which I know will greatly upset the 3 people that read it and have just now realised they haven't seen my posts in a while! Anyway thought I'd try something new and post a few things too small for a blog on Twitter instead. My motivation in doing so was to try and encourage the people who follow me (and have the means) to consider going electric with their next car. I know that in the communities and forums I'm in everything I'm saying is common knowledge, but I wonder if the general public know some of this?

Firstly a thread about going downhill: [this used to be a link to Twitter, but now it’s gone].

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Then about the thing people ask about most, charging: [this used to be a link to Twitter, but now it’s gone].

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That said I feel like I have to give the people actually reading my blog something a bit extra, so here's a recent picture I took of my car in the Adelaide Hills. What's that? You don't care? How dare you!

I've tweeted a bit about Apple's rejection of Hey update from their iOS App Store. It was no surprise to me that this story got the attention it did. If there's one thing a long time Apple Developer knows, it's how many feelings of anger, confusion and outright disappointment so many of my colleagues in this industry hold towards Apple. You might not be as familiar with them, because for the most part they all hold them extremely close to their chests and share them only in private forums with people they trust. None of them are idiots, they know that if these views were public, it could harm their careers and incomes. They love, hate and fear Apple all at the same time. It's a wild place to be, believe me.

So if that part didn't shock me, why am I bothering to write a blog post? It's because people leapt to the defence of Apple almost as quickly as this news story broke. That's right, this 1.5 trillion dollar company, the biggest company in the world, has people out there that are more than happy to defend them when they shake much smaller companies down for their protection money.

I find it odd, in 2020, with Apple being the biggest company in the world, worth over $1.5 trillion there are still people rushing to their defence no matter what.

Yes, they build amazing things. No they don’t need you to defend them. They’ll be fine.

— Russell Ivanovic (@rustyshelf) June

Now I realise that there's some historic context here. Apple was once the champion of great design, having a tiny portion of the PC market and fighting for all that was good and right in the world. Reporters and the general public mocked and derided them, predicting their downfall was just around the corner for a long, long time. This led to long time Apple followers developing instinctual reactions around explaining, slowly and calmly to people why Apple wasn't about to die, and why in fact they were an amazing company that deserves more recognition than they were getting. I think some of these people haven't yet woken up to the fact that this isn't the same company anymore. They are now, quite literally, the biggest company in the world. They have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, just sitting in bank accounts. It's this company that went to TechCrunch to explain their side of this story. You see they weren't trying to shake Hey down! They just care about usability! They are just enforcing the rules! People care about rules right?

I could write a book on how that was one of the most tone-deaf things I've ever seen come out of Apple. Marco Arment sums up my feelings on this pretty aptly here. It makes you wonder whether people like Phil Schiller even know just how much developers are privately seething about their constant abuse at Apple's hands for over a decade now. Yes a decade. Here's a fun history lesson for you about something that happened to me a full 10 years ago, on the eve of WWDC.

But instead of writing a book, I'd like to explain rationally and calmly why I, like many developers am so alarmed at the escalation happening here by addressing a few of the common rebuttals and points I've seen people make in Apple's defence.

It's Apple's store, they invented the iPhone, they can do what they like! Also retail stores are way worse and 30% is a good deal!

This is such a compelling argument at a surface level. Apple is providing a store experience, putting your product on their shelves, and giving you a generous 70% of all profits. If this were all Apple was doing I'd be in 100% agreement with this take. Heck they could charge 50%, or even 70%, it would be their store, their choice. The issue is, Apple also makes the iPhone, and has mandated that there's no other way to get software onto an iPhone except through their store. So what you have is the company which has a monopoly on installation of software on the iPhone, mandating that you use their store, and give them 30%. If you don't like that deal, there's no alternative available. It's the definition of anti-competitive monopolistic behaviour: taking the market dominance you've created in one market, to give you an unfair advantage in another.

To me this would be more like if Samsung ran a giant supermarket chain, and also made only 1 of 2 fridge's available worldwide. Then they mandated that only food bought from the Samsung store, could go into the Samsung fridge. Now market forces would thankfully stop that from happening in the retail world, because that's a deal no one would accept, you'd simply go and buy someone else's fridge. The issue is, in the smart phone market we now have a duopoly between Apple and Google. There is no other phone that's any good out there as an alternative. Additionally it's not customers that are getting screwed over right now, it's mostly developers. As such this is a problem capitalistic market forces won't and can't solve. It's why anti-trust laws exist, to prevent situations just like this one.

Again, if Apple offered their store as the best place to get iOS software, but gave developers a way to either directly sell apps to consumers, or allowed alternative stores, I think they could set whatever rules they wanted. As it stands they don't have that luxury, because they have ruled themselves to be the only game in town. Imagine a world where developers wanted to be on their store, instead of being forced to. Imagine a world where Apple had to compete with other distributions methods to be the best one, not just the only one. Is that really a world you want to argue against?

Apple is just trying to cover the fees of running the App Store. How are they going to cover them if no developer is paying them?

Or in the words of Phil Schiller himself: "These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years."

This is a wild take. The worlds biggest company, is just trying to pay for their expensive store! Give them a break, they are just trying to make ends meet! A simple thought experiment puts this whole line to sword: imagine a world where Apple pulled all third party apps from their store. No Facebook. No Netflix. No Gmail. No Spotify. Now imagine how many phones they'd sell over the next 2 years, shipping them only with Apple made software. There's how you more than pay for your store. Just ask Microsoft how well their phone business went without the support of third party developers. I'm also ignoring the $99 we give Apple each and every year, and their search ads business that we're forced to pay them for just so we appear in search results for our own app names. Because nothing, absolutely nothing is as big as the profit Apple makes selling iPhones, which wouldn't exist without high quality third party apps.

As a final nail in the coffin: Apple themselves don't contribute to Google Play revenue to distribute their Android app, Apple Music. Yep, you guessed it, they bypass Google's 30% cut by using their own payment processing. How is poor Google going to pay for their expensive App Store with companies like Apple not paying their own way 🙃? That's right kids, do as we say, not as we do.

Apple just cares about usability! It's not a great experience to install an app then be immediately asked to sign in, with no explanation.

No, no it's not. It's also extremely common place on the App Store, as this website shows. Isn't it odd then that the reason so many of these apps don't show sign up pages, is because Apple forbids developers from even alluding to their being a way to pay for their service through their own websites? This whole weird install experience is a direct result of Apple's draconian rules, and them trying to extract a 30% cut from companies big and small.

Consider Netflix, the poster child of weird sign up screens.

They are a big company that doesn't need my sympathy, but do we really think that when they've done all the marketing, all the content deals and all the hard work of acquiring a customer, they should be forced to hand over 30% to Apple merely for being allowed to be installed on an iPhone? It's extremely unlikely Apple is driving customers their way through being in the App Store. Netflix is doing all the work, and Apple wants to skim a significant amount off the top just because they can. That doesn't seem fair to me at all, and that's without considering all the additional hassles that Netflix using Apple's payment system would introduce for them. They can't help a customer change billing details, they can't help them get a refund, they pretty much can't do anything except ask the customer to contact Apple.

We're in the situation we are because Apple demands you either use their payment system, or never breathe a word about yours anywhere in the app. That they are now going even further and saying that even that's not enough, is extremely worrying. I believe they are trying this with smaller companies first, who they hope won't fight back, before moving on to even bigger companies, with which they will no doubt do back-room deals to negotiate lower fees. They stand to make many billions more if this strategy succeeds, and who is going to stop them when there's no alternative way to get software installed on an iPhone?

As a developer, who has put up with this for over a decade now, I'm only asking one thing. Please consider how many of us feel this way, and how bad this will be for developers and eventually, customers, if Apple keeps being allowed to move the goal posts further and further without us pushing back. I want to end this with something John Gruber wrote earlier this week:

"To say that “many developers do not want to speak out for fear of falling afoul of Apple” is an understatement. Almost none do. And one thing I’ve learned this week — mostly via private communication, because, again, they fear speaking out publicly — is that there are a lot of them."

For those following along at home, in my previous post I talked about getting a second battery and installing more solar on my roof to try and go completely self powered. The core issue is that a 5kW system just wasn't enough to charge 2 Powerwalls and keep my house completely off grid. It would perform great on sunny days, but throw a few cloudy days in and suddenly I was back to drawing on grid power like some kind of caveman. My goal in putting more solar on my roof was simple: could doubling my solar capacity mean I could go completely off grid?

The conclusion as it turns out is a resounding: YES! Here's what happens now that I have an 11kW system on a sunny day vs a rainy day:

The above is interesting for a few reasons:

• Most people don't realise that you can still generate solar power even when it's raining. My system pulls down around 2-3kW when it's bucketing down.
• With the above in mind, now think about the fact that the sun comes up every day, on a reliable and predictable schedule. You can literally set your watch to it. This means the power is very reliable. The sun isn't likely to break down anytime soon.
• A typical house like mine needs around 20kW/h a day to power itself. Obviously this will vary widely per household, but you only need to check your last power bill to see what your daily average is.

Which means that, even on a rainy day, my house can power itself with no issues. Additionally on a sunny day, it can make me money by exporting excess power back into the grid:

The graph above shows power being generated from the sun in yellow, and below the graph you can see the green part is where it's going into the battery, and once full, the grey is the power being put back into the grid.

There's one last bit of this experiment I want to share which surprised and delighted me. I have an electric car (you can read more about it here). Prior to installing these panels I was charging my car mainly from the grid. I use an energy provider called Amber, which has 30 minute wholesale based prices, so I would wait til power was cheap to pull down lots of it. This flexibility was nice, but it still meant I was needing to draw on the grid to power my car. On average I use roughly 10kW/h's a day to drop my kids off at school and go to and from work. While electricity is far cheaper than petrol (and cleaner, especially here in South Australia!), I still was a bit miffed that this was throwing a spanner in my 100% self-powered works. It turns out I needn't have been, because for the last month, my car has been 100% powered by the panels on my roof as well! I think it's worth pausing for a moment just to think about that. All the power my house uses (for hot water, cooking, cleaning, washing, heating, cooling, etc) and my entire commute to and from work and other family outings, are now powered by the sun beaming onto my roof every day. Not only does that mean it's free, but it's also dependable and convenient. If there's a shortage of oil/petrol, I'm not bothered. If the power goes out for a day or more, I'm not affected. I'm completely self-sufficient in the best possible way.

So what does a typical 100% off grid day look like? My car (which I plug in when I get home) is scheduled to start charging itself 1 hour 20 minutes before I leave for work. Most mornings there's 70-80% remaining in my batteries (they have a capacity of roughly 27kW/h), and my car takes about 10kW or so out which is what I'll use that day. Then the sun comes up, and starts charging the batteries back up. Depending on the weather they are normally full sometime between 12pm and 3. At night we use about 20% cooking, doing the dishes and powering our night-time activities and so we're back to about 80% by bed time. There are a few weather based variations as well, for example on a really hot day (30 degrees celsius or more) I'll flick on the air-conditioner remotely at lunch time to cool the house down to 23 degrees using that free excess power. Here's an example of the day described above in graph form:

The blue spike at the start is my car charging, then you'll notice another spike when the air conditioner turns on. The green and grey below the graph are power going into the battery, then once full the rest going back into the grid. Maybe I'm a nerd, or perhaps just plain weird, but staring at this image fills me with a weird sense of satisfaction and awe. The electrons and I are no longer enemies, but friends enjoying a journey of energy discovery together.

Quite a few people who read my previous post about having an electric car (https://rustyshelf.org/2019/05/31/australia-meet-wattson/) have been asking me what I think of home battery solutions like the Tesla Powerwall 2 and if I'd ever consider getting one. The answer might surprise you: no, I wouldn't consider getting one. I would however consider getting two!

I purchased the first one in 2018, and when the South Australian government introduced a home battery rebate (which equated to $6000 towards a home battery) I decided to get a second. The solar inverter you can see in the picture is hooked up to a 5.1kW solar system (soon to be 11kW). I know it sounds like hyperbole but I think this battery might be the single best purchase I've made in recent years. The first and most obvious reason is this:

I have solar panels on the roof, generating up to 40kW/h of energy a day...and when I most need it (around 6pm when we're cooking dinner and then later that evening) the suns not really around anymore to help me out. Additionally here in South Australia we pay on average about 40c per kW/h for power and are given around 10c per kW/h for power fed back to the grid. That means I pay roughly 4 times more for power from the grid than they pay me for power I give back. Something about that always felt wrong to me. I'd invested in power generation that sits right on top of my house, but when I needed them all those electrons were long gone and I had to pay for different, more expensive ones. Not to mention that mine were 100% renewable, who knew what sources these other nasty electrons came from?

So I did some rough maths, decided a home battery was the way to solve this problem and paid my deposit. Tesla being Tesla took their sweet time in fulfilling my order. In total it took around 6 months from when I placed the order to when the battery was installed. After about half a day for installation it was powered on and I immediately installed the app to see what was going on. I was greeted with this fun and rather mesmerising animation:

[wpvideo lo3IXGd3]

I'm not kidding when I say my wife and I have wasted many a moment just staring at that animation. It's a fairly simple thing: there are 4 main items in the coloured circles. You have your solar panels (yellow) and the power grid (grey) which can both supply power. You have your house (blue) which uses power. Lastly you have the battery (green) which is both charged by the solar panels and supplying the power to your entire house until it's flat. Almost every day after the battery was installed my entire house became self-sufficient. This meant while I wasn't home the battery was being charged to 100%, and the rest of the remaining power sent back to the grid. When I got home the battery kicked in to power us through the entire night and into the next day. My power bill dropped to almost $0 overnight.

Then something even more interesting happened...

The power went out to our entire neighbourhood for a full 21 hours. The only reason I knew it was out was because I noticed all the lights in my home flickered for a split second. Then I got a notification on my phone from the Tesla app.

I got up off the couch, looked out the back door and our entire suburb was dark...except for our house. We watched TV, we made tea with the kettle, we cooked dinner and left our lights on the whole time. It was such a surreal experience knowing that our house was powered by that one (relatively) small battery in our garage. When we woke up the next morning and found out the power was still out I immediately wondered if the battery would continue to charge without a grid connection. I forgot to ask the installer about this, but sure enough when the sun came up, our battery went straight back to charging itself back up. We were, for the first time ever, completely off the grid.

At work that day I got a notification from the Powerwall that the power had come back on. The final kicker was that a month later our power company sent us a cheque for the inconvenience of having been without power for 21 hours and their sincerest apologies. I cashed that cheque grinning like a giddy little school boy knowing that we hadn't been without power for a single second of that time.

So if life was so amazing with the panels and battery, why did I bother to buy more? Well summer was a rush, no doubt about it with 1MW of power generated by my panels:

Then, in the same disappointing way it finally did to Winterfell, winter came to my place as well.

And it was at that point that I knew if I could find the means I had to do 2 things: double my solar production so I could be self sufficient in winter while also doubling my storage capacity to cover those pesky heavy cloud days. Solar panels had almost halved in price since my original install, so the first part seemed easy. Then the South Australian government introduced a home battery rebate which sealed the second part for me. Even with the price drops and rebates, this second part of my journey became less about return on investment (which I'd calculated to be about 4-6 years) and more about just doing everything in my power to farm my own electrons and use them on my property. I was drunk on the power of, well, making my own power and I wasn't about to let a stupid season defeat me. The second battery went in last month and the extra panels should go in next month.

When winter comes for me next year, you better be damn sure I'll be ready for it.