Oxford County Takes Another Look At Charging Stations

Thursday, 10 May 2018 05:16

In an attempt to keep up with the changes of diesel to electric cars, Oxford County and CUTRIC are looking at their charging stations.

OXFORD COUNTRY - Oxford County is looking at locations that could use charging stations for electric cars.

The County worked with CUTRIC (Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium.

CUTRIC worked on a report showcasing some locations in oxford county that could use a charging station. This showed some sites in cities that could use some charging stations.

Director and CEO, Dr. Jospia Petrunic talks about some of those locations.

"In general what we modeled out was, where are there locations where you find a parking spot, usually with 20 or more parking spaces where people tend to go because they are going to work for an extended period of time or where they tend to go because they are parking for an extended period of time because there are lots of amenities around. The sites that we typically found were things like hospitals, shopping malls, complexes where kids might go to play soccer or hockey or whatever the case might be. So those kinds of clustered sites typically came up as our priority sites because we knew that if chargers are installed there at any power level, people would be using either for work, or for leisure or as intersectional locations where they could go shopping or do lots of other stuff. So they would be relatively well used and not isolated or stranded."

They also noticed that the towns of Lakeview, Embro, Innerkip and Drumbo all have nothing around for electric charging stations.

Dr. Petrunic says that the reason for the needed changes is new regulations that will make hybrid cars more common.

"So the future regulations that are coming down the pipeline, well they are actually already here, are called the cafe standards, the corporate fuel economy standards and these were standards that were created in the United States, but Canada adopted them several years ago and these standards basically say that your car needs to be twice as efficient as it is today by 2025. That means that a car the size as a Ford Focus needs to become more efficient then a Toyota Prius. And that by the laws of physics is impossible without electrification, hybridization or alternate propulsion. There is no way that you can get a thermodynamic engine system, a gasoline or diesel engine system to perform at that level of efficiency. Trust me, lots of scientists has tried, physicists have tried, we have all tried and hit our head against the walls of the laws of physics."

Oxford County council gratefully accepted the report and will now look at possibilities moving forward.