Originally published on EV Obsession.
Cara Clairman gave the 4th presentation in the Renewable Cities “Trends, innovations, and barriers in electrifying transportation” panel that I recently moderated in Vancouver. (See my presentation, Brian Hansen’s, and Gil Friend’s if you missed them.)
As the CEO and president of Plug’n Drive, as well as the driver of a Nissan LEAF and Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Cara knows a thing or two about electric cars. Actually, she knows a lot (she really impressed me), and I was happy to learn several important things from her presentation.
First of all, she noted something I didn’t realize: transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in almost every province in Canada. With a lot of existing hydropower plants, that makes sense, but it’s something that hadn’t hit me before. I’ll highlight other key points following the video and slides:
The third slide very nicely highlights how much electric vehicles (especially fully electric vehicles) can cut greenhouse gas emissions in various Canadian provinces. And the fourth slide similarly shows how much they can help you to save cash (… Canadian cash, but it’s essentially the same elsewhere).
Cara also highlighted something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the tremendous health costs of air pollution. Just in the province of British Columbia, where the Renewable Cities conference was held, they are projected to total $30.18 billion from 2008–2031.
She also did an excellent job highlighting how limited electric vehicle supply has been in these first few years of the modern electric vehicle era. Given the limited number of models and limited availability, sales actually look pretty dern good. What we need, of course, is more models on the market, more effort by their makers and dealers to actually sell those models, and more awareness about and experience with these vehicles.
Something very useful I learned about is that Plug’n Drive has created a public charging station map for all of Canada, combining chargers from various companies (ChargePoint, PlugShare, Sun Country Highway, Le Circuit Electrique, and others).
For more goodies, check out the video and presentation above!
As shared before, below is the audio of the full panel if you want to hear the full panel right now and just want to listen. Otherwise, I’ll continue writing about each of the presentations in the coming days. Also, btw, you can download slides from most of the Renewable Cities presentations here if you are interested in diving deeper into the conference.
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