When I was coming back to the Kootenays from Kelowna in early October in my electric vehicle (a Nissan Leaf), I travelled through the Strawberry Pass on my way to Rossland and noticed that the larches were all a brilliant golden yellow. There is a set of trails in an area just north of Rossland known as Larch Ridge, and I wanted to take my family to show them before all the needles fell, so we decided to go the weekend right after I got home.
I’ve gone from Nelson to Kelowna twice in the last month and thought I’d share some photos, data, and random insights from each trip… and in between the two trips, several new chargers were added on Highway 3, happy days!!
Don’t worry, this isn’t a novella (unlike the Sechelt trip report!)
September – Nelson to Kelowna via Revelstoke, back via Osoyoos
Click to enlarge…
Since I completed my last trip to Kelowna in the spring in our electric vehicle (EV), a 2014 Nissan LEAF, a new Direct Current Fast Charger (DCFC) had come online in Revelstoke, so when I planned this trip, I really wanted to take the slightly longer northern route.
Read More »Two trips to Kelowna – and many new Highway 3 chargers!
I participated in the Nelson EcoSave Green Energy & Home Show again this year as an Electric Vehicle (EV) ambassador. I also gave a short 5 minute talk and 3 minute Q&A afterwards. Many people were there to look at the EVs; Murray took a number of people for a ride in his LEAF, and Dave in a Tesla Model S also came down from Rossland. I also brought our electrified Edgerunner cargo bike. Lots of interested people with many many question!
This post contains the presentation I gave, along with a number of “infographics” that I prepared and left on a display table for the public to view while at the Home Show. Click on any of the files/images below to download or to view as a larger image.
Well, I crossed over 50,000 km with our 2014 Nissan Leaf today, so I thought this would be a good time to take a look at where we are with costs to-date.
Cumulative cost table – click to enlarge
This post is the trip report of our journey to Sechelt and back in June 2015. The trip came out of an invitation to participate in a planning workshop for future deployment of Direct Current Fast Chargers (DCFCs) in British Columbia (BC). For a quick primer on different levels of EV charging, head here.
Part 1 of this series can be found here and includes a description of the planning process. For this post, we’re headed straight to the journey itself.
For the TLDR; version (“too long, did not read!”), skip right to the heading at the bottom for “Trip Takeaways”).
A quick reminder on our trip plan – we would work our way across southern BC on Highway 3, utilizing Level 2 charging infrastructure over 2 days until we reached the Level 3 DCFC infrastructure in the Lower Mainland on the 3rd day.
Trip Planner Tool – click to enlarge
The post title is a reference to how the trip would encompass two fundamentally different types of charging and provide a stark comparison of the reality (as of June 2015) of long-distance travel via Level 2 chargers vs the future: the expanding network of DCFCs!
The First Journey (seeing the sights!)
Knowing that we had set a pretty ambitious time to leave town of 10 am on Friday June 12 (hey that’s early when you have two young kids!), we did a fair amount of packing on the Thursday night, then got up the next morning and proceeded to cram everything in… and left at the bright and early hour of 11:30 am!Read More »A Tale of Two Journeys – Part Two
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
On the Easter weekend of 2015 we were able to experience our first “Kootenay Trifecta”; one of the many reasons we decided to move here was the possibility of gardening in the same weekend as skiing.Read More »Easter Weekend Trifecta