EVs are a key part of Canada's climate strategy. But there aren't nearly enough chargers, analysis shows
EVs are a key part of Canada's climate strategy. But there aren't nearly enough chargers, analysis shows
Canada's most populous provinces are falling behind many U.S. states when it comes to building fast charging stations for electric vehicles, a CBC News analysis shows, raising questions about whether this country's infrastructure is ready for a transition to cleaner energy.
I’m not against EVs, but let’s not forget that they are still expensive and inefficient car infrastructure. EVs won’t do anything about congestion on the 401, or suburban sprawl causing the housing crisis.
Cars will always exist, but what we really need is more public transportation. It’s a no brainer to have a high speed train from London to Quebec City. And electric bikes — yes biking in winter is fine, people all over the world do it, Canadians used to do it before cars took over. You just need good bike infrastructure and dedicated snow removal for bikes.
While I see the emotional appeal, I don't think that EVs are the future on any significant level. Most people only use their cars for routine trips between home, work, and a few popular places for shopping and entertainment. Two of the four are completely centralized and the other two are generally focused into notable clusters. This creates nothing but choke points for cars, and commute time data shows just how bad it is.
Toronto had an average commute time of 84 minutes of 2019. One way. I use transit between bus, subway, streetcar, then walk, and still manage under an hour despite going halfway across the city to work, with 5-10 minute wait times between each transfer. That time doubles the moment I had to use a shuttle bus because that has to go through one of the massive choke points in Toronto.
What we need is greater capacity, more extensive, more reliable, and more comfortable transit solutions so we can just stop making it take 10 minutes to go 3 blocks during rush hour. So people can go even long distances quickly and comfortably when their jobs require it.
EV charging points are important, but only in strategically placed locations like on highway rest stops, as if you still insist on using an EV for commuting, you can just charge at home overnight as 99% of drivers would use less than 10% of their car's charge a day. It's only for vacations that fast charging stations would actually be used.
Also we need to properly promote remote work. Commutes suck especially bad when you're doing a job you know you could be doing from home instead of wasting 20% of the day just getting to the office.
That's a rather large-city-dweller-centric view of what people use their cars for. Public transport certainly can and should be part of the solution, but it's often impractical in lower-density areas.
Let's see here, the last few times I took a car out of town . . . Well, we could have gotten the six boxes of books shipped, I suppose, but it would have cost more than just going and fetching them from 120km away. Family funeral on short notice—no option other than doing the ~400km-each-way drive. Medical emergency (mine)—400km-each-way drive again, since it wasn't a life-threatening condition that would have caused them to find an ambulance right away, just something that could have blinded me in one eye. None of those things were recreational, and most of them weren't really optional, either.
Some trips out of town are important, and you don't always have the luxury of waiting for public long-distance transit that runs only a couple of times a week, or enough notice to prepare your vehicle in advance. We need private vehicles, and the infrastructure to keep them on the road. EVs may not be the future in Toronto so much, but Toronto is only one small part of the country.
The parents of the youtuber Technology Connections life on a farm, yet they own an EV, and apparently they never use charging stations as the range on a second hand one is more than good enough for regular trips despite going to an entire city over.
Modern EVs have a range starting at 400km nowadays, and I did say that highway rest stops should have charging stations. No matter how quickly you need to get somewhere, it can't be so desperate that you can't afford a half hour stop every three or four hours. And if it is, it sounds like something you probably shouldn't be driving yourself for and instead be calling for an ambulance or helicopter.
In the end, my argument is that all this shit about not having enough fast charging stations is going about things backwards. Charging stations shouldn't be concentrated in cities, but instead along the highway, as EV range is great enough that daily transit doesn't require charging along the way, or even at the destination.
This also gives the people who actually need to drive (contractors, etc.) an easier time because of reduced traffic.
EV is for sure the way to go for short trips if you're not a fan of people and public transportation. I live in a relatively small suburb and public transportation is terrible. I'm not going to uber or take a cab anywhere. I will drive myself. With having an EV you charge it at home and/or work, and you plan your charges on a trip. It's only a big deal if you are lobbying against electric, have no idea how it actually works, or a troll.
If you're that worried about a vacation (it's literally no big deal now and with charges being added daily it will be less of an issue) rent yourself a dinosaur burning vehicle for your trip. That's always a better option anyways, keeps miles off yours and you don't have to give a shit if something goes wrong, they'll give you another. Door ding? Pffft. I have nice cars and I take a rental for vacation.
Try saying that when your commute involves spending an hour in rush hour going a single kilometer that a subway does in five minutes. Your situation isn't an argument against public transit, but for making decent public transit. Of course you're going to chose a car if there's no good public transit where you live. But what if there's a bus terminal five minute walk from where you live, or a subway station in ten minutes by bike with parking, and the rest of the trip takes half as long as it does by car, at a fraction of the yearly cost (gas, insurance, maintenance, licensing), and you can even sleep on the trip because you're not the one driving. Not to mention never having to worry about finding parking near your destination if you're not paying for a dedicated spot.
This is the reality for those of us who are able to use transit on a regular basis, and we only pay like 15 minutes a day from our wages for this service, not a week's worth every month to own a car. It's even better in the EU, like in Germany or Spain, since high speed rail means that you can go pretty much anywhere you want, even on vacation, without a car. And for cheap. One guy ran the numbers, and for 10% the cost of owning a car, he was able to get a yearly pass for both high speed rail and city transit in two different cities for the cost of owning and operating a car for a year.
The other issue is where they are. Two thousand chargers in Montreal do you no good if you're on the Transcananda out near Longlac, Ont., in that area where there's no cell phone coverage.
I don't really know the area or charger quality, but there's a 50kW Ivy station in Geraldton, a total of 38km away from Longlac, Ont.
I picked Longlac because there's a long stretch of pretty-much-nothing to the east of it until Calstock (Geraldton's to the west). Even if you're driving an ICE vehicle, you want to keep an eye on your gas if you're up that way. You'd need to be even more careful if you were driving an electric on a -36C January morning. Maybe one of the handful of campgrounds or tourist resorts along that stretch has a charger (if they don't, they should get some put in, 'cause they'd probably make a killing).
There is something wrong with the data.
It claims only 500 chargers for all of Quebec, but Montréal alone has 2053 chargers.
Use this source: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/analyze?fuel=ELEC and filter it to DC Fast Chargers
And there's only 185 charging locations in Quebec (with 529 ports, which is NOT how they should be counted).
The data is for DC fast charging stations, of which Montreal only has 73 according to your source.
Ahhh, okay, so the data is fine, it's just the definition that isn't clear. They only speak of "fast charging" which can be type 2 or 3. Type 2 would generally be sufficient for local users, with type 3 being more important for trips that require a charge during, ie long distances.
With that in mind, I think type 3 chargers to highway volume may be a better metric. For example, a couple type 3s by the bridge and ferries in PEI is probably sufficient. Whereas Ontario needs significantly more along highways 11 and 17, when you spend a day crossing the province.
The total number of EV cars is less relevant than the number of EV cars that do long trips, or that would do trips if the charging potential was there.
Of course a single dedicated passenger rail line could eliminate the need all together.
If EVs are a "key part" of Canada's climate strategy, we are all seriously fucked.
Care to explain? They're a massive environmental leap forward from ICE vehicles. Many places in Canada need transport just like personal vehicles, and transportation is a huge portion of Canada's GHG emissions. So how else would we reduce that portion of our environmental footprint?
EVs are an environmental disaster because:
one, even a minor accident makes the vehicle unrepairable, because the battery packs can't be tested to verify if they've been damaged
and
two, battery packs are worth up to 50% of an EVs' price, so replacing them is cost-prohibitive, so EVs are written off after 8-10 yrs (because the batteries are old tech at that point and can cost upwards of $15k to replace).
This is a bad analysis. Chargers per car is only one way to look at it. What about chargers per capita, chargers per road km, chargers person per land area, etc... oh? In all of those metrics Canadian provinces are leaders? You don't say.
https://public.tableau.com/views/EVFastChargingPlugStandards/RegionrankingsforDCChargers
I work in this industry. The number of chargers is set to explode in the next 2 years.
An equally important number is how many of the installed chargers are functional on any given day.
In my experience, there are a lot offline for days at a time.
We don't only need to install more, we need to maintain them after install.
In my city I've noticed a few locations in parking lots of big box stores that are being prepped for what looks like a bunch of charging stations.
We recently did a road trip with our plugin hybrid and there were more chargers in reality than showed up in the apps yet.
Wow, the table in that article really shows how far behind we are. 0.1 charging stations per 100 vehicles whereas the average is about 4 per 100 vehicles in the US
So, a few things...
Most homes that I've been in have electricity. If you have a wall socket, you have a car charger. You might not be doing 500km every day, but you'll be charging.
Second, most underground parking spots can have a 15A, 20A, or 50A plugs installed. My office has underground parking, and every stall has a 120V 15A plug, included in the monthly cost of parking... PLUS it has 10 L2 chargers available, which aren't available to the general public. This article probably only includes public infrastructure, but there is a metric fuckload of private infrastructure as well.
Last, I've done trips from Montreal to Havre St Pierre (via Lac St. Jean!) and on a different trip, to Gaspé. The charging network is already very, very good. Even places without cell coverage have MULTIPLE public overnight chargers -- I was astounded that Saint Michael du Squatec had three publicly available chargers, plus a campground that will let you plug into a 50A socket for free. On both trips (which lasted a month each) I had to wait for a fast charger just two times. Once for 10 minutes, and another for about 30. I realize this will change as more electric cars hit the roads -- but every company (The Electric Circuit, Chargepoint, Flo, major gas station brands) are all installing new infrastructure weekly.
My office has underground parking, and every stall has a 120V 15A plug
and how many spots in that underground parking lot? Just a hundred would be another 1500amp service just for that.
Maybe 100 in total? Doesn't matter... It used to be a factory, and it's now mixed use. They did a few modernization projects (lighting, replaced old power-hungry equipment), and reduced their average power draw by 1MW. And there aren't that many electric cars, and they're not all there are the same time. When I need to charge, I plug it in, but schedule the charge to start at 1am when demand drops off.
as someone owns an EV, some areas really have no chargers. I lived in Markham, ON, for the last 5 years and the only public fast charger at city hall is always down. Only other option is to sit at the YMCA parking lot.
There's multiple at Markville Mall, one is East Markham at the Scotiabank on HWY48, a set of them at the Hyundai Canada head office that are open to the public, and two Tesla supercharger sites in addition to the two you mentioned. That's just the DC Fast chargers, there's more than a few level 2 chargers at grocery stores, civic centres, and shopping malls.