Background & study area

About electric vehicles

Electric vehicles (or EVs) are vehicles that use one or more electric motors for propulsion. They are classified into three major categories by their fuel consumption technology:

    1. hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs),
    2. battery electric vehicles (BEVs),
    3. and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

So both BEVs and PHEVs are also referred to as plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), since they are designed to be recharged by plugging into the power grid. These PEVs are the subject under analysis for this project, and from here on will be referred to as just electric vehicles or EVs.

The range, or the “average maximum distance that EVs can travel before running out of charge”, varies per model of car. Some models being released in this year will go up to around 400km. Tesla has a new EV model planned for sale in 2020, which will apparently be able to run for as much as 1000km. However, those are on the high side in terms of range. After reviewing various sources, the average maximum range is closer to around 200km.

The Canadian government has been making efforts to provide more public charging stations across the country, in the aim to transition more consumers towards using EVs. This March, two parks in BC (Glacier National Park and Yoho National Park) were the first parks in Canada to have EV charging stations installed in them. These are both very popular parks, located within in the “Kootenay-Okanagan” (KO) region.

Study area

The KO region is the specific study area for this project. As of their official 2015/16 Annual Report, BC Parks found that this region is the most popular for camping of all the BC parks regions, and second most popular for day-use. This region has been outlined in Map 1, below:

Since there is so much traffic to BC parks by car (for both camping and day-use), the implementation of a strategic network of public EV charging stations is important to ensure that drivers feel comfortable travelling to the parks in their EVs.

Therefore the goal of my project is to determine the 10 best parks for new EV charging stations within the Kootenay Okanagan region of BC.