When Jamella Hagen and her boyfriend planned a four-day road trip to bring his new electric pickup truck from Vancouver to Whitehorse, she anticipated challenges.
She knew the gaps between fast chargers in the North, so they planned stops in communities with EV charging stations.
What she did not anticipate were the wildfires.
“Our choice to drive an EV was an attempt to reduce our personal impact on climate change,” she wrote in a CBC first person column. “But on the road, we encountered climate change disasters all around us, and we had to cope with them while learning to use a new and still fragile charging network.”
Some of the routes Hagen planned to take were shut down and redirected to make room for evacuees leaving Kelowna and the Shuswap region.
Knowing the EV truck wouldn’t make a long distance between chargers, Hagen made unexpected stops, like a hotel where a charger was a 20 minute walk away. Hardly unusual, she said, as she often finds EV chargers located in inconvenient places, such as the edges of town or behind buildings.
“If I was travelling as a single woman, I would have found myself missing the comfort of a brightly lit gas station on a lonely stretch of highway.”
Overall, Hagen says she’ll still consider buying an electric vehicle herself while living in the north, but only if her family had an additional, fuel-powered car at the ready.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
I didn’t know anyone who lost a home but watching all of Yellowknife evacuate and parts of Hay River, N.W.T., burn showed northerners like myself that fires are now an ongoing reality for us.
After our flight landed in Vancouver and we started driving north under smoke-filled skies in Grant’s new Rivian, we were forced to change our plans yet again because a fire had jumped the Stewart-Cassiar highway near the Yukon border.
In a mild panic, I posted to the Yukon EV Facebook group, asking for information on where to charge knowing we would soon lose cell service on the upcoming stretch of the highway.
We gratefully slept while our truck charged, only to find at lunchtime the next day that the Fort Nelson level 2 charger was the slowest yet, and we would have to spend another night after only travelling 381 kilometres.
In addition to realizing the infrastructure of charging stations in the north was not as robust, I was also surprised to find EV chargers often located in inconvenient places, such as the edges of town, behind buildings, or at the far side of box store parking lots.
On our final day of travel, eager to get home, I watched as the northern Rockies and fast green rivers gave way to low forested hills of the Yukon.
The original article contains 1,431 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is actually amazing. And a bad journalist.
I would not be surprised if (on a data science level) this means something about the true intentions and validity of the article.
Good bot!