Facts vs. Fiction: What you need to know about EVs in Canada
electric vehicles are a hot topic of conversation in Canada.Will Canada be able to meet the 2035 mandate imposed by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for all new car sales to be electric? Will all those Teslas, Chevy Bolts, and Hyundai Ioniqs overwhelm and break the grid, as many fear? And what then of the batteries? Is disposing of them after their useful life is over going to create a landfill nightmare scenario?We look at some of the top questions Canadians have about EVs, and provide some responses.This is a big watercooler conversation in Canada. The concern is that all those EVs coming online in the next decade or so will be too much for provincial power grids to bear.
Though not directly related to the preponderance of EVs, grid instability is, after all, what happened this past winter in Alberta during a cold snap, when residents received alerts warning them to reduce electricity consumption or face rolling outages.Experts say it’s important to understand that it’s not as though all the cars on the road are going to become electric tomorrow. It’s a process that’s going to take place over 10, 20, even 30 years as internal combustion vehicles reach their natural end cycle and get taken off the road.
This amounts to an extra burden on the grid of one or two percentage points of additional usage per year, according to University of Toronto engineering professor Daniel Posen. Another way to look at it, he says, is that’s about a 15 to 40 per cent increase from now until 2050 — all within the realm of manageability.“This is not like it’s going to creep up on us by surprise,” Posen says.But it also doesn’t mean that provinces and municipalities don’t have to plan for more power use, as drivers wean
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