Skip to content

Road Trips

A Tale of Two Journeys – Part One

Introduction

In May I received an invitation to a workshop to help plan future deployment of Level 3 DCFC infrastructure in BC. The workshop was to take place in mid June in Vancouver and hosted by PlugInBC. The workshop was to include representatives from government, educational institutes, BC Hydro, various EVSE network service providers and several other EVangelists. I was invited to provide some perspective from outside of the Lower Mainland and was extremely excited about the prospect of attending. I immediately went into planning mode and floated the trip by Marley later that evening – I could either do the trip by myself, attending the workshop on Monday and getting home late Tuesday night (or heading straight to work in Trail on Wednesday morning), or we could move some of our holiday plans around to allow her and the kids to come as well… and of course we would have to do the trip in our EV! It would have been crazy to drive our gas car to attend a workshop on DCFC infrastructure – I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to explore the current state of Level 2 and DCFC infrastructure in the various regions of BC!  (click here for an explanation of Level 2 vs DCFC and visit PlugShare to explore what infrastructure is available in BC currently)Read More »A Tale of Two Journeys – Part One

Trip Report: Kelowna and back, Part 3 (and the last!)

This is the third and final part of 3 posts on my trip from Nelson to Kelowna and back in February of 2015.  Links to the earlier posts:  Part 1, Part 2.  Part 3 covers my journey from Kelowna back to Nelson.

Trip back home

The night before I was to leave for home, I started thinking about the other possible ways to get home. I had previously looked at different ways to the Okanagan based on the infrastructure available in the Okanagan valley in the summer of 2014. At that time I had ruled out the ‘middle’ route from Vernon to Needles/Fauquier (via Cherryville), it was just too far of a stretch at 355 km with only Level 1 charging opportunities along the route (that’s about 36 hours of charging!) However, the northern route looked potentially promising, especially after Sicamous added a Sun Country Highway EVSE at their new visitor center, and the Best Western added an EVSE in Revelstoke. That brought the “Level 2 gap” down to only 250 km between Revelstoke and Nelson, comparable to the gap between Osoyoos and Nelson of 265 km.Read More »Trip Report: Kelowna and back, Part 3 (and the last!)

Trip Report: Kelowna and Back, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my trip report from Nelson to Kelowna and back. Part 1 can be found here

Grand Forks to Osoyoos

As noted in Part 1, my planning seemed to be right on par, but a thought had kept bugging me while I was eating breakfast. My spreadsheet takes into account elevation gains and losses, but it does not differentiate between whether the hills are near the beginning of a route, in the middle, or near the end.Read More »Trip Report: Kelowna and Back, Part 2

Trip report: Kelowna and Back, Part 1

This is Part 1 of what will likely be a 3 or 4 part series on a recent trip from Nelson to Kelowna and back.  Part 2 can be found here.

Preface

A pure electric vehicles (EV) with the range of my Nissan Leaf, coupled with the lack of infrastructure in our region, really makes a road trip greater than the range of your EV an exercise in patience. If you can afford a Tesla right now, then this road trip would have been comparatively simple, as you could fairly easily drive the regular speed in winter and make it between public chargers with range to spare. However, for most of us, a 6-figure vehicle is simply out of reach, so if you need to regularly do trips outside the range of the EV you are looking at, you may want to consider a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) instead. In a few years, when infrastructure has filled in and there are longer-range EVs for a reasonable price (see the upcoming 2017 Bolt), this trip will become commonplace and little different than driving in a gasoline vehicle.Read More »Trip report: Kelowna and Back, Part 1