Plug'n Drive's Blog Has Moved

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Winners all around!

We are happy to announce the winners from EV Day Toronto, Guelph, and our EV Getaway Contest. 

Congratulations to Cindi on winning a one night stay at the Element Vaughan Southwest, four single day passes to Canada’s Wonderland and the Nissan LEAF for four days!

Congratulations to Antony on winning a week with an electric car from EV Day Toronto.

Check back with us over the next few weeks to see what they thought about their EV experience!

Also congratulations to our EV Day Guelph winners, that received a $20 gift card for Stone Road Mall.

•  Andrew C.
•  Ambica
•  Axl Schneider
• Chung-Ying C.
• John P.
• Lindsay M.
• Richard C.
• Ryan S.
• Simon

Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook and make sure to visit our site for any upcoming news, events and contests that we will be conducting.

Getting ICE'd

July 18
written by Ron Groves

If you drive an electric vehicle or plugin hybrid you know what I mean by “ICE’d”.  ICE or Internal Combustion Engine describes most cars on the road today that burn gas or diesel fuel.  As EV public charging infrastructure is built, drivers of gas powered cars are not always aware when parking in a public parking lot that some spots are reserved for the use of charging electric vehicles.  And if they do take one of these spots, they are parking in my refueling station.  And that is called, “getting ICE’d” by EV owners. Even if, as they come to a stop in the parking spot, they look up and see the blue glow of the pilot light from the EV charger and realize it is for charging EV’s, they usually shrug their shoulders, lock the car and walk away.  They were in that spot first right?  Not the point!  In many cases there were plenty of other parking spots available in the parking lot.  They could have just backed out and chose another one.  Lazy indifference.  Or, parking spots are few and they have to drive to a lower level or the far side of the lot to park.  Lazy, and mean!

Why mean you ask?  What if, in order to get back home, I need to add some energy to my battery?  My expectation is that I can use a charging station that is not in use.  But if someone parks their gasoline powered car in that spot, blocking the charger, the charger still shows as available on mapping apps.  But the parking spot… not so much.

As more of the EV charging infrastructure is built, standard signs that designate the parking spot as “EV only” will be crucial.  Not only to help EV owners find the charging spots as they cruise the parking lot, but to also warn ICE owners that this spot is reserved for EV’s only.  Currently there are few bylaws that actually have teeth to make it “illegal” to park in an EV charging spot.

In the meantime, as EV owners, what can we do when we discover EV charging parking spots poached by a gas car?  I know what you feel like doing!  But please, don’t do that.  Many gas car owners mistakenly think EV drivers are a bit bonkers in the first place.  We don’t need to validate their belief by doing anything rash.  I have left notes.  Polite notes! With my contact phone number and name.  Funny, no one called me back yet.  But it did usually compel the ICE owner to park elsewhere the next day.  Problem is, there are too many of them!  I get rid of one, and another takes its place.

I have also approached management of the parking garage about the problem.  I just wanted to point out to them that if they are installing EV charging in their parking garage, could they not do a better job of ensuring the EV charging spots remain open for EV’s?  The words “You will be ticketed or towed” work very well on a sign.  Even if they don’t have the power to do that, would you park there and take the risk?

Sometimes, if the lot owner is in a kiosk at the parking lot, they will put an orange cone on the EV parking space.  It serves two purposes. First, seeing the cone, the ICE owner looks up trying to figure out why the cone is there. If the EV parking only sign is visible, ICE drivers get it, and move on.  Education!  Second, most people are in a hurry.  The cone is a physical barrier that has to be moved before you can park. It takes time to get out of your car and do that.  So they move on to quicker, easier parking.  As an EV owner, getting out to move the cone is a minor inconvenience. Voila, charging happiness.

Fortunately, many charging stations have over 20 feet of cord.  One charging wand can often serve 3 parking spaces.  There is nothing that says an EV cannot park in an ICE spot. So if two parking spaces down, there is an open spot, and the cord will reach, Bob’s your uncle.

By the end of 2014 there will be over 10,000 plugin vehicles on the road in Canada and over 2500 Level 2 public charging wands.  While public EV charger installation continues to happen at a good clip, there still may not be enough charging stations in some communities to meet demand.  And this brings up a whole new issue to discuss in my next blog.  How do EV owners share public chargers?  Until next time, “Be nice, educate the ICE”

Cruise to a better range!

Is it possible my 2014 Nissan LEAF can drive more energy efficiently than me?  I have been driving for 40 years and spent my old corporate life in the car rental industry driving every kind of vehicle you can imagine.  I taught fuel saving EcoDriving courses, and developed electric vehicle driving training courses for fleet drivers.

When I first started driving electric cars 2 years ago, Mitsubishi loaned us an i-MiEV.  In 2012, it was voted the most efficient electric vehicle on the planet.  If you knew what you were doing with the throttle and regenerative capabilities, you could turn 16 kilowatt hours of electricity into 120 kilometers of range or more.  I think every EV owner should learn to ecodrive on an i-MiEV.  Exacting 120 kilometers of range takes patience and technique.  It helps that the i-MiEV has a very simple “driver coach” display on the dash and excellent regenerative capabilities.  As the i-MiEV trains you to drive energy efficiently, those special energy-saving driving techniques become second nature for an EV driver.  These deft energy-saving skills that convert every electron into forward motion in an i-MiEV, translate very well to improve the range of a LEAF, Focus, i3 and etc.

Last week I had to make a trip to the Georgian College Autoshow in Barrie where Plug’n Drive will host their first EV ride’n drive event with their students.  I am driving up on Highway 11 through the rolling farmland north of the GTA in a 2014 Nissan FEAF at around 85 kilometers per hour (km/h).   The speed limit is 80 km/k, traffic is light, and it is a sunny warm day which is perfect since I am trying to conserve battery for the ride’n drive activity for the students.  I drive the LEAF in B mode the whole time which maximizes the LEAF’s regenerative breaking and ensures I get the best range from the splendid 24 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery.

I don’t use cruise in a vehicle too often, since I like to participate in the driving experience.  However, this time I set it for 85 km/h in the LEAF.  There is an energy coach display which is a series of blue circles that fill the white dots from left to right corresponding to the amount of energy you are suing at any given moment.  As we ascended one of the many hills on this stretch of highway, I noticed the car used precisely as much energy as it needed to maintain the speed I asked for.  Then on the downside of the hill, it regenerated electrons beautifully all while maintaining my speed!  I could not have done it better myself, the car did a better job of using energy than me.  Frankly, I found that a bit disconcerting.  As a driver, it seems that I am being made more and more redundant by the electronic system in cars.

If maximizing the range in your EV is important to you, using the cruise control was a valuable lesson in electron management.  For now, I am still the better driver in the city.  That is, until autonomous cars that talk to each other hit the market.  Google, Toyota, Nissan, Volvo, Tesla (which one of these is not the like other?) and many others are all working on vehicles that can take over from drivers and do either the entire job, or take the humdrum out of stop and go traffic jams or long distance highway trips.  The good news is most of these vehicles are being developed as pure electric or hybrids.  Using clean, plentiful, mostly carbon free electricity that we generate right here in Canada to power our cars is good news for sustainable transportation.  I just hope these new intelligent cars will let me drive from time to time.

Top Clean Energy and Climate Trends for May 2014

Author: James Glave
Webinar Produced By: Clean Energy Canada
Original Article: Top Clean Energy and Climate Trends for May 2014

What are the most important trends in climate change and clean energy today? If you’d joined our debut Clean Energy Quarterly webinar earlier today, you’d already know. In a packed hour, we presented the highlights from the hundreds of news items curated each week in our Clean Energy Review weekly digests.

We also welcomed three special guests: Jim Burpee, the President and CEO of the Canadian Electricity Association, Cara Clairman, President and CEO of Plug’n Drive, and David Berliner, the co-founder and CEO of CoPower.

Here’s a quick recap for those who weren’t able to join us:

Solar’s Moment in the Sun

The year started with Deutsche Bank issuing a bullish demand forecast for the global solar industry, building on four consecutive years of growth in utility-scale solar, which has largely been driven by China, Germany and the US

We also saw the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant open in the Mojave desert, which generated a lot of attention, and we’ve started to hear more frequently about the transformativepotential that solar and renewables more broadly offer, and the disruption they are already creating for the business model of traditional power utilities

So far this year the numbers we’re seeing are impressive – in the first quarter Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracked a 10 percent increase in clean energy investment over the same period last year, with a 23 percent increase in solar investment. Noteworthy in this result is the fact that there was really strong growth in rooftop solar.

Clearly, solar has emerged as the flavour of the day, driven in no small part by the dramatic reduction in solar panel hard costs, which is improving cost competitiveness.

We’re also seeing a mainstreaming of solar as individuals are empowered to put solar on their rooftops. There are some innovative models out there for leasing and financing rooftop solar, and partnerships with recognized brands, like Home Depot. It’s getting easier for people to assume some control over their own power production, and that’s powerful.

In Canada, we’re seeing progress on three new commercial power plants that will be built this summer in Ontario by a company called Canadian Solar, which was ranked as the best performing solar maker last year, and is definitely a company to keep an eye on as they ink deals in Canada and around the world.

Unusual Suspects Step Up

We’re also witnessing the arrival of big-brand, non-energy companies—unusual suspects, if you will—into the renewable energy marketplace.

We already know that a lot of non-energy tech companies are making serious investments in renewables—either buying wind and solar farms outright or investing in them. Think Apple, Google (more than $1 billion investment now), Intel, and Facebook.

What is interesting is that we also increasingly seeing a lot of “unusual suspects” from beyond tech, like Whole Foods, REI, and MARS, which just announced a wind farm in Texas, and Ikea, which now owns wind farms in Canada and the United States.  Globally IKEA is Investing $2 Billion in clean energy and efficiency investments. The company hopes to be net zero for energy by 2020.

This is more than just the usual P.R. effort we’ve seen in the past, i.e. recycling. That’s because some of these brands are advocating for policy reform and using blunt language.

IKEA in particular is speaking up about the need for climate action: “Business needs policy leadership including legally binding targets on CO2, renewable energy, and energy efficiency —  to build a low carbon economy.”

It’s just becoming mainstream good business practice and these companies are flexing their corporate muscles to send a message to their governments— and shareholders. At Apple’s annual meeting,  CEO Tim Cook told a group of climate deniers to “get out of the stock.”

Why is this happening? Three reasons:

1. There’s money to be made from renewables investments and risk to be mitigated. Energy independence helps a company insulate against rising energy costs. Tech companies spent a lot on energy, so does IKEA, big stores use a lot of energy.
2. Leadership sends the right message to customers; the younger generation has greatest support for energy and climate leadership. IKEA wants to be associated with sustainability. They want to be hip, these days this this is how to do it.
3. They have a stake in climate disruption: In January the New York Times flagged that many leading U.S. brands  like Coke and Nike now view climate disruption as a force threatening lower GDP, higher food and commodity costs, broken supply chains, and increased financial risk.

China Gets Serious

Most people think about China and they immediately conjure up those headline statistics about coal plants, but the reality is that China is making a huge push on renewable energy. In 2013, for the first time, China installed more clean energy capacity than fossil fuel based power generation.

And they’re not stopping. China aims to more than double its wind capacity in the next six years, and is also pushing hard on solar and hydro while also considering a massive tidal power plant.

So what’s driving this clean energy push in China?

There is no single driver, but really it’s a confluence of forces.

There’s international pressure for China to act on climate change and reduce carbon pollution, so we see China mandating the reporting of CO2 emissions by firms and piloting carbon trading markets.

But there has also been a huge domestic driver in the form of growing unrest around air pollution in China’s big cities.

The Chinese premier has declared war on smog, and the government committed to taking action to remove high-emission cars from the roads—and while we won’t touch on it today the Chinese are positioning themselves very strategically on electric vehicles—but also by closing some coal-fired power plants.

Canada has a great opportunity to export clean energy technologies and services to the Chinese—and polling by the Asia Pacific Foundation found that Canadians would like to see these exports take priority.

Guest Presentations

We were pleased to welcome three guests on our webinar, and they have kindly agreed to share their presentations here.

Cara Clairman, executive director, Plug’n Drive

Jim Burpee, president and CEO, Canadian Electricity Association

David Berliner, co-founder and CEO, CoPower

Will the next big thing for EV happen in 2014?

I am going to rip off a statement by my good friend Paul who has been in the automotive industry for many years.  2013, the year that wasn’t.  That was his comment with regards to electric vehicles and the technical non-advancement that happened in the EV category. While more EV's and PHEV's came to market (Focus, Cmax, smart ED, etc) they all seemed to be based on the same technology ie; achieved the same range and charged in about the same time, as those already on the market. And to be honest, I don't see that changing this year either.

What we will see is a huge build out of EV charging infrastructure, with more Superchargers from Tesla, more DC Quick chargers in BC, Ontario and Quebec, and hundreds and hundreds of L2 commercial chargers from Chargepoint, us at Plug'n Drive, Add Energie, and Aerovironment. So I predict this year to be the breakout year for infrastructure.

Interestingly, Nissan is installing DC Quick chargers all over the US at many of their dealers. For now they are Chademo standard, which only charges iMiEV and Leaf, but could have the new SAE Combo standard added. Would be nice to see Nissan install DC Quicks in Canada, but I doubt it.

As for progress with EV's, my prediction for 2014 is we will just see more mfg's enter the marketplace with a PHEV/EV, sold first as a compliance vehicle in California, and then spreading to other States and Canada. Not a bad thing. The public has said they want more choice in this segment. But I think we will have to wait until 2015 to see cheaper EV's with greater range. For example, I like the Tesla vs GM rhetoric that has been flying around (mostly from GM and the media) about GM beating Tesla to the punch with a $35K, 200 mile EV. If Elon keeps his eye on Tesla, and not Mars, my money would be on Tesla. EV is all they do keeping them focused on the next step. But I wouldn't count GM out. That 200 mile range will be all about the battery. As a global company GM is in every corner of the R&D world. If someone builds a better battery, they will know about it.

But a vehicle to watch imho is the plugin hybrid pickup truck. I suppose you could argue that all the previous segment busters were new body styles and a PHEV pick up will not necessarily look any different. But segment busters were also about utility. Minivans carried more people, sport utilities extended a vehicles off road capability without looking and driving like a pickup. A PHEV pickup will satisfy all those who love pickups, but put a green spin on the segment helping the buyer feel less guilty about their purchase (surely in this day and age they must feel some guilt, surely!). This vehicle will provide greatly enhanced fuel economy (over other pickups), the versatility of a mobile power source (110V and even 240V on board power) all wrapped up in a package that does not compromise what pickup owners love...power, big rig status, hauling, towing, off road, and 4 doors (for the family don't you know).

The only company I am aware of making any progress with a vehicle like this is VIA Motors (viamotors.com) out of Utah of all places. They are focused on the fleet market hoping to prove their vehicle on the job. Contractors, utility line repair, emergency services (get rid of idling but still keep on board communications and HVAC running), farming, military etc. As we know, the pickup truck is still king and outsells every other vehicle segment in North America. For some, it is a necessity. But who wouldn't want to save money on fuel, enhance the functionality of the vehicle, have a more comfortable driving experience (reduced noise, less visits to the gas station), reduced maintenance costs all combined with (almost) guilt free driving?

Certainly the polarizing appearance of electrics like iMiEV and smart are not going to take EV into the mainstream. Tesla knew high end, high performance sports cars would not only provide proof of concept but also sell! As long as the vehicle could provide the performance and exclusivity of other high end exotics in that class. So ergo, PHEV pickups. The market is ready for the next great thing in this technically stale segment. A truck that, with good intentions, tries to keep up with the move to a sustainable world. At the moment VIA Motors is an underdog in the EV world. Time, gas prices, and the willingness of the general (pickup driving) public to believe they personally can do something to lower their carbon footprint, will tell the tale.

Advancing EVs by recognizing the top EV dealers

A blog by Plug'n Drive President and CEO, Cara Clairman

As you know, at Plug’n Drive we are big fans of electric cars because of their potential to reduce CO₂ emissions while at the same time using surplus off-peak electricity that is made locally, providing local economic benefits. And of course cleaner air benefits all Canadians.

As a group that spends a lot of time doing outreach and education, we  know that drivers have some common concerns about switching to EVs, such as the location (and number) of public charging stations, the vehicle models available, the  driving range  and the price tag to name a few..  However, , the EVs on the market today can meet the  needs of many Canadian drivers -   Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) stats tell us that most Canadians drive 50 kms or less a day; that’s well within the EV range.

Its easy to be optimistic about EV - battery life is steadily improving, the climate imperative is increasing, charging station networks are expanding, a number of provinces across the country have rebate programs in place and more and more models of cars are coming online every year with lower price tags.  Taking all these developments together, EV success is no longer an “if” but a “when”.

What else can be done to make it easier for drivers to choose an EV? One area of opportunity we see is on the sales floors of car dealerships. There are some car dealerships in various regions across the country that are doing a fantastic job at pairing their customers with electric vehicles. This is true despite the fact that, at present, the profit margins can be less on EVs – which means a salesperson might make less money selling an EV over another model – and despite the fact that it often takes more effort to sell an EV because it's different, is relatively novel and needs more explanation than a more familiar car, and despite the temptation to sell cars that generate more revenue on service than EVs which are known for low maintenance costs.

What is the difference between dealerships that are growing EV sales and those that are not? There is some evidence that suggests an important factor is having knowledgeable sales representative willing to go the extra mile to promote EVs as a viable option. There are ever-more environmentally-conscientious customers who are hungry to make choices with their dollars that lower their carbon footprint. And there are even more still who are willing to lower their carbon footprint if it’s easy and convenient and saves money. Dealerships that take steps to encourage the adoption of EVs become partners with consumers to help solve one of Canada’s energy and environmental issues.

Recognizing the potential benefit of identifying and rewarding dealerships that have found ways to help consumers to choose EVs, Plug’n Drive has partnered with the Canadian Electricity Association to create the very first ever Canadian EV Dealership Awards.  We want to celebrate those top EV dealers and encourage others to take a page out of their playbook.

The awards will be launched at Electric Mobility Canada's EV2013VÉ conference in Ottawa, Gatineau on October 23^rd and the first awards will be presented at the EV2014VÉ conference.

For more details on how this exciting contest is going to work, check out www.electricvehicleawards.ca.

Whether you are selling EVs, driving an EV, participating in the industry, or simply observing,we look forward to your participation in this initiative!