Canada Invests in Ontario’s Electric Vehicle Network | Hacker News Reader

Canada Invests in Ontario’s Electric Vehicle Network

canada.ca

44 pointsreddotX26 comments

This will be good additional charging infrastructure for Canada. More chargers charging more EVs is good for everyone.

Petro-Canada has a trans-Canada CCS charging network already: https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/ev-fast-charge-...

Electrify Canada is working on it: https://www.electrify-canada.ca/locate-charger

Looks like they both charge per min, not per kw/h. So you are at a disadvantage with a slow charging car?

Probably the outlet itself, not the power is the scarce resource, so that might be fair

The problem is when the cost of the electricity is higher than gasoline, sometimes far higher. This is bizarre in Canada where the gasoline taxes are very high. I have a hybrid, so I use the cheapest option, but I also see high priced chargers sitting idle.

The pricing methodology is all over the map. A new problem is the practice of free level 2 charging and charging money for fast chargers. The fast chargers sit idle and the free L2 chargers are all in use. Personally, I would pay, but my car only supports L1&L2.

From what I understand, there are energy regulator laws in various Canadian provinces that have made it difficult to charge per kw/h.

Some combination of the two (time and energy) is ideal to prevent station hogging, though.

I know it's a tad pedantic, so excuse me:

When we're talking about energy, the units are kWh (i.e. kW * h), not kW/h. Watts/kilowatts are already defined as unit energy per unit time. In the case of watts, we're talking Joules (energy) per second. kWh is thus 1000 joules / second for 1 hour (3600 seconds), or 1000 * 3600 = 3 600 000 joules (3.6 MJ).

kW/h exists, it just means something different - a rate of acceleration of changing energy (joules / s / s).

Surely households are billed by metered kWh?

> Some combination of the two (time and energy) is ideal to prevent station hogging, though.

That's a good point; in the extreme you wouldn't want someone sitting there trickle charging for ages when already charged.

If it were up to me it'd be tiered like:

    t <=30min: £V / kWh
    30m < t <= 2h: £W / kWh
    2h < t <= 4h: £X / kWh
    4h < t <= 8h: £Y / kWh
    t >= 8h: £Z / kWh

where V < W < X < Y < Z, and probably per daily billing period rather than per charge, to avoid cheating it by unplugging and re-plugging if you were nearby at work or a motorway service station say.

Utilities can do it, but not non-utilities like charging stations.

That's great. I wish the government would work with the provinces to standardize and rationalize charging rates and prices.

Due to laws that prohibit reselling of electricity, getting charged by the minute is the standard, yet, how much energy you're getting in that minute varies wildly based on: whether the charger is shared, how cold it is, what car you drive, which station you pulled into etc. Figuring out how much you paid for a unit of energy is very hard and makes it almost impossible to cross-shop.

Tesla gets partly around this by having a high-speed rate (~44 cents/minute > 60kWh, 22 < 60kWh), but it still makes it very hard to pull into a supercharger and know how much your charge will cost.

At the end of the day, each charger should have a posted price of $/kWh. High-speed chargers should charge more and you should be able to know what you'll pay before you plug in somewhere.

Unfortunately the conservative Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford cancelled EV rebates last year.

Pardon me for being cynical, but this feels like shallow tokenism to show how "progressive" the liberal-minority federal government of Canada is, just as most of their actions seem to be.

Canadians, especially those in densely populated cities with poor public transit like Toronto and Vancouver, already struggle to live day-to-day. Where are they going to get the money for an electric vehicle when:

- the average income in Ontario is $50-$60k (CAD), less than $4k per month net

- the rent on a one bed apartment is now averaging $2300

- despite zero service improvements, the cost of transit continues to be put up

- groceries are now extremely expensive compared to US and EU

- Internet, cellphones, etc. plans are more expensive than anywhere else

As a result, vast amounts of even "well paid" white collar workers can't live in the cities and instead move hours away and are forced to drive essentially everywhere, including into the cities for work.

30 years of stagnant incomes, increased taxes, soaring costs of living and unapproachable costs of housing and the government makes a song and dance of $8 million on EV chargers? Trudeau spent $600m keeping the fed-friendly media afloat [0], has committed $1.4bn to foreign "women's health" [1] and more.

The friendliness of Canadians is echoed in their sheer complacency with regards to their own governing. Whether it's a strength or a weakness is up to the individual to decide.

[0]https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-bolsters-struggling-m...

[1]https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeau-ann...

Having lived through the years of federal Conservative fiscal mismanagement under Harper and now (what feels like 100 years) under utterly incompetent and blatantly corrupt provincial Conservative leadership here in Ontario I know I am not alone in hoping for a much bigger change in the next election.

Yes. And yes. I am Canadian and complacent is what we are. I spent last year in Russia and France and no one there is complacent. I feel that complacent is the best way to describe our comportment.

Sadly the current Ontario government is against this kind of thing.

Tesla and Volkswagen are already selling government subsidized electric cars and installing government subsidized chargers. Now they get the chargers for free. No one voted for this enormous wealth transfer from poor to rich. Nor a car ban in under 20 years.

A carbon tax and rebate along with a similar carbon tariff on imports is by far the best way to combat climate change. Efficiently price the externalities caused by emitting CO2 and let the market fix the problem itself. The rebate ensures that the carbon tax is not regressive.

But to work properly, the carbon tax needs to be above CAD100 per ton, almost doubling the price of gas.

But that's unpalatable to most, so instead they have to resort to far inferior measures like electric car subsidies.

No one voted for climate change either, yet here we are. Sometimes you just have to deal with reality.

I disagree. Scientists have been sounding the alarm over climate change and man's impact on it with pollution and emissions for over 3 decades at this point.

One could argue generations of the electorate have voted for it by de-prioritizing, or completely ignoring, the issue and candidates who stood for it.

> Now they get the chargers for free.

The car industry gets fuel stations and roads for free as well.

Charger costs will reduce. Battery based chargers will be a game changer for infrastructure cost:

https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/13/volkswagen-battery-based...

They can be installed anywhere with no need for big transformers or high power cabling. And they offer some charging capability during power outages.

Gas stations are built without our tax dollars.

Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to charge. Hopefully there’s an app for that.

If costs keep dropping, EVs will become a no-brainer for most. Scrap the government incentives and we will achieve the inevitable.

> Gas stations are built without our tax dollars

Are they? They need fuel to sell. Where does that come from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/15/climate-change...

> Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to charge

This is infrastructure building. Canada's got the right idea here. Build roads, build chargers. Makes sense.

You're comparing charging stations to gas. A more logical comparison would be electricity in charging stations vs gas in gas stations.

It's all part of the same system. What use is a gas station without gasoline?

Do you want $3.3 billion going to fuel subsidies or do you want $8 million going to EV chargers. If you're interested in a smaller government spend, you want to pick the EV chargers.

That’s what I though too. 8 million is peanuts for Canadian government. Even for the provincial one. I think it’s more a PR move.

"Scrap the government incentives and we will achieve the inevitable."

Government incentives helped overcome the industry chicken-egg problem. Purchase subsidies are effectively R&D dollars towards what is inevitably the future of cars.

Amen

This isn't a big enough issue to topple this monitory but hopefully soon they get out of power. Very poor fiscal management. Budgets apparently don't balance themselves

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