New EV charging stations coming to Mary Winspear Centre

Sidney’s town council has agreed to work with BC Hydro to install up to 16 EV parking spots at the Mary Winspear Centre. There are currently six EV parking stations available in Sidney for public use. These are located on Third Street, in Iroquois Park, Tulista Park, and the Town Hall parking lots. Four of these are owned and maintained by the Town of Sidney, and two by the provincial utility.

Sidney’s council moved a motion at its Jan. 22 meeting to pursue the charging stations to further align the city with the province’s Clean BC Plan to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

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The proposal includes both DC fast-charging stalls and Level 2 charging stalls. In DC charger stalls, grid power is passed through an AC-to-DC converter before reaching the vehicle’s battery. Whereas, at an EV station, current is passed through a lithium-ion battery and its battery management system which, in turn, regulates current and battery temperature.

More charging stations needed, seems to be the consensus

The results of a 2022 survey by Pollution Probe indicate that the majority of current Canadian EV owners feel that the existing number of public charging stations is insufficient, with a particular emphasis on DC fast chargers.

The matter seemed rather uncontentious until the issues of accessibility and the environmental viability of lithium-powered EV technology as an alternative to fossil fuels were raised by councillors.

Coun. Sara Duncan was emphatic in her rejection of the motion based on the questionable implications of critical mineral [Lithium] mining outcomes on the environment and Indigenous people living close to extraction sites in the Global South. “This is a very bad idea from an environmental perspective and a GHG mitigation perspective,” she said. “We don’t even know how to recycle the batteries or dispose of them,” she said. According to the American Chemical Society, only 5% of LIBs (lithium-ion batteries) have been recycled.

While councillors Steve Duck and Scott Garnett expressed their confidence that staff could effectively work with BC Hydro to meet accessibility standards as are required concerning design and actual station and types required, Coun. Terry O’Keefe had reservations about proceeding without first involving SPAAC (Saanich Peninsula Accessibility Advisory Committee). She cited misgivings about past accessibility projects. “We’ve had experience in the past with the strips at the intersections for blind people but there were corrections needed there.” Her overarching concern was that the council might be ill-equipped to make decisions about accessibility design left to its own with BC Hydro.

BC Hydro, an active fiscal partner in the project

BC Hydro will cover all costs associated with building, operating, and maintaining the stations but will collect user fees to offset these costs. Charging time for vehicles will range between six to 14 hours. People exceeding their allotted charge time will be required to pay a fine. It was not clear, from committee discussion, whether the payment infrastructure will be by app, or credit/debit discharge and whether EV station-use payment infrastructure will be compatible with other locations in the CRD or even throughout the province.

A national review of time-versus-power-based charging fees was conducted by Measurement Canada to address billing options. Currently, flat fee time-based billing options are being used in Canada based on potential costs associated with upgrading the makes and models of EVSEs (electric vehicle supply equipment) that are capable of measuring electricity delivered to an electric vehicle.

So, how many, then?

Council members also wanted to know the precise number of spaces that would be available once provision for accessible spaces in the lot was made. Jennifer Clary, the director for engineering for Sidney clarified that “the town does require a number of spaces within a parking lot to be marked accessible,” but “the same regulations do not apply to EV chargers. It’s the parking lot as a whole,” she said, “and we are not updating the parking lot as a whole, we’re just adding EV parking space to it.”

Accessible parking spaces require a 2.7-metre space with a 1.5-metre walking aisle between two spaces. For vans, these numbers are higher. She assured the council that it “looks like it will be easy to accommodate wide enough parking spaces of up to four which would meet the town’s standard accessible parking space width and we would work with BC Hydro to make that happen.”

Precisely how many stations will be installed also will depend on the type of individual stations that will be added. For example, if one of the EV stations is reserved for an accessible van, that will mean, according to Clary, one fewer EV parking spot.