COLUMN: EV users receive gold-plate service

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Doug Ford wants more Ontarians to own electric vehicles (EV). Heck, he even wants a special electricity rate to charge such vehicles.

Those of us who live in small-city, rural Ontario can’t be too happy about that. Many EVs lack the desired range between charges that most of us would be comfortable with when we have to make treks across the municipality, or beyond.

Urban parts of the province, as in big-city urban sectors, may have supportive public charging stations in sufficient quantities, but a quick look at what has happened in Chatham-Kent, and we’re just not ready to care much about this just yet.

In fact, the thought that someone could be plugging in their car while the rest of us help subsidize that rate, or an outright lack of rate, is annoying.

Look at the municipal charging stations for EVs in Chatham-Kent. There are seven locations total, with 14 chargers, located in Chatham, Blenheim, Wallaceburg and Dresden.

To date, the municipality has not charged drivers to plug their vehicles in at these locations. Of course, that’s when the cables haven’t been cut and stolen – something that has occurred at the Cultural Centre in Chatham on at least one occasion.

In a report to council last summer, those 14 chargers collectively saw an average of five users a day – so about one in every three stations got utilized in a given day – and dispensed about $1,850 in free current in the first six months of 2023.

Well, not free. The cost came out of municipal coffers, so we, the taxpayers, paid for that. That’s roughly half the property tax on an average C-K home going to pay for someone else to drive an EV.

On one hand, paying for other people to charge their cars is annoying. On the other, the poor usage rate of these stations is also annoying. Granted, it will grow as EV usage grows.

Still, the lifecycle cost of the seven municipally owned charging stations is about $25,000 a year, according to municipal officials. Operation and maintenance costs are estimated at about $10,000 a year as well – for terrible usage numbers.

Again, that will change. For the rest of us who aren’t in a position to purchase an EV, what is the municipality doing for us? Not a darned thing.

And the incentives for more people to switch to EVs in C-K are minimal. As of this time last year, C-K officials said there were an additional 14 or so privately owned charging stations across the municipality. Combined with municipal stations, that’s fewer than two dozen in a municipality the size of Prince Edward Island.

The province’s minister of energy wants the Ontario Energy Board to explore special rates for EV charging at public charging stations. We aren’t happy with the special treatment, but something would be better than nothing.

1 COMMENT

  1. This cheaper rate for charging is only to encourage more investment into building EV charge stations. Do you think these charging companies will “pass along the savings” to the customer? If you think so then I have a bridge to sell you. That’s my biggest issue with EVs, if you can’t charge at home it just won’t work for the vast majority of condo owners and apartment renters. Public charging is prohibitively expensive

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