By Dean Gallea, TEAC Co-Chair and Energy and Conservation Committee Chair

New EV Charging Stations Ready for Use: Thanks to a grant from Westchester County and incentives provided by Con Edison and the New York State Energy Research Development Agency (NYSERDA), the Village has installed 20 new electric vehicle chargers in four stations at municipal parking lots. There are four new chargers in the Washington Street West Lot (Lot 4, outside to the left of the parking garage entrance), four new chargers in Lot D next to the Recreation Center, six new chargers in the lot next to Village Hall (Lot A) and six new chargers in the McKeel parking lot (Lot 5). The stations in Lot D, Lot A, and Lot 4 are activated and operational. The McKeel Lot station will be activated in the coming weeks.

As part of the County-wide installation project, the chargers use the

. Parking fees and rules apply when charging. There is a $.30/kWh charge for the electricity, and the charging rate is Level 2, about 40 miles per hour of charge.

The Village will also be replacing the existing damaged charging stations at Lot C (next to the Train Station) to convert them to ChargePoint stations in conformity with the others.

When I checked recently, the Lot A Village Hall station was active, but did not yet appear on the ChargePoint app. One of the 4 chargers at the Lot D station was offline. And the chargers at the Lot 4 station were all working, even though they show status as “Unknown” in the app.

Using Con Ed’s “Weekly Energy Update”: I’m getting an email every week from ConEd, usually on Saturday, covering the prior Sunday through Friday. You can opt into (or out of) this weekly email by logging into your ConEd account online, and “flipping” the switch on your Notifications settings:


I’ll normally do little more than glance at it to see if anything stands out as “unexpected.” This week I thought I’d take a look at why both my electricity and gas use were elevated. If you like, you can follow my analysis and do the same for your own data. It tells me that last week, Jan 23-30, I used 9% more electricity and 38% more gas than the prior week, Jan 17-23.

First, let’s look at electricity. My home’s normal usage in the winter is about 20-24 kWh per day - for a visualization, that’s about the same energy a small 1000-watt hair dryer would use if it was left running all the time. That covers lights, smart-home devices, data devices like my router, entertainment, my furnace’s forced-air blower, my heat-pump water heater, and laundry and cooking appliances. I also have an electric vehicle that typically gets charged at home once a week or less if I’m not traveling much. ConEd’s daily graph shows a large spike on Sunday 1/25, and also details the hourly use that day:

That turns out to be when I charged my car: I plugged it in the night before the big snowfall, to be sure I would have plenty of range the next day in case the power failed. The car is programmed to charge during the early morning hours (finishing by 8am) when the grid has plenty of extra capacity. That top-up charge increased my weekly electricity use by about 9%. So, one mystery was solved. 

Now, on to why I used 38% more natural gas than the prior week. The only gas appliances I now have are my furnace (my central heat pump switches over to gas when it’s below freezing outside) and clothes dryer, and I didn’t do laundry last week, so it’s due to heating. What caused me to use 38% more heating gas last week?

Maybe the weather: A house loses more heat “by degrees” when it’s colder outside. “Degree-days” are simply the difference between the average outdoor temperature each day and the chosen indoor temperature you keep, which in my case is 65 degrees. ConEd used to provide the local degree-days data right on our bills, but stopped years ago. But that data is available elsewhere, so I used the site

, choosing data for the nearest official weather station, White Plains Airport (KHPN). I downloaded the degree-days for the last two weeks and plotted it for illustration:

Right away, I could see that last week was colder than the prior week, but let’s do the numbers. The sum of degree-days from the earlier week’s Saturday 1/17 through Friday 1/23 was 254, and the sum from last week’s Saturday 1/24 through Friday 1/30 was 351. Dividing last week by the prior week: 351 / 254 = 1.38. Surprise… That’s 38% more! I didn’t expect it to be so spot on, but there it is, my gas usage tracks the cold exactly. So, no mystery on either type of energy use. You might want to enable your own weekly energy update from Con Ed, and at least glance at it to see if it makes sense to you.

Power-hungry Data Center Pushback Succeeding: The AI buildout by tech megaliths like Google and Oracle demands enormous and growing computing power, provided by large, concentrated data centers all over the U.S. They each use the energy of a small city, most of which is “wasted” to cool the chips that power AI. Data Centers’ new energy demands have usually required expansion of