FEMA & EV Charging Providers Need To Talk About Post-Evacuation Bottlenecks
One of the big “gotchas” the anti-EV crowd tries to throw at EVs is that they’d fail you in a hurricane evacuation. I’ve covered this before, repeatedly, but no matter how many times we bust the myths and garbage surrounding it, the lie just doesn’t go away. Like other right-wing memes in Florida, it’s even managed to become a bill in the legislature.
For those who won’t read the links, I’ll quickly sum up why this “checkmate, libs” trash argument is wrong. Keep in mind that gas pumps require electricity to get the gas from the underground storage tanks, leaving gas cars and EVs on level ground. But, when gas pumps can run out of fuel due to demand, the EV charging stations keep chugging along right up until the power goes out (and that’s well beyond evacuation time). Plus, most EVs get charged at home and can evacuate far enough to get to safety on what’s already in their battery pack every morning. Finally, EVs don’t lose range sitting in evacuation traffic jams as bad as gas-powered cars do.
So, yes, EVs are good enough to at least get inland far enough for safety, even with current infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean the situation can’t be improved upon to make evacuations easier for the families that own EVs after they’ve made the minimum distance for safety.
The problem I’m about to discuss (and suggest serious solutions for) isn’t something that affects many people today, but if we want to swap out most gas vehicles for EVs, eventually we could find half the refugee population in this position, so it’s something we’d better think about now instead of once we’re in the middle of a big problem.
The Problem That Remains
For EVs, we don’t need nearly as many charging stations as gas stations. Because most of us charge at home, most of us only need public charging on days where we do an unusual amount of driving. We will need many more EV charging stations as the population of EV drivers grows, but it doesn’t make sense to build many more charging stations than future EV drivers will actually need. Like anything in the economy, we have to be efficient with our dollars.
Gas stations have a similar economic efficiency. There are enough gas stations to meet the high end of normal demand, but even in normal times you still see a lot of people in line at places like Sam’s Club and Costco. There’s enough fuel production to meet normal needs, and enough tanker trucks available to haul fuel to stations at the rate of normal needs. But, before hurricanes, we’ve seen gas stations run out of fuel before some people got a chance to evacuate, so there’s just not enough spare capacity in the gasoline industry to satisfy extraordinary demand.
With gasoline, wiser people recommend that drivers fill up at half a tank and keep the bottom half in reserve for emergencies. This is probably enough to get far enough from the evacuation zone to fan out a bit and avoid overwhelming the gas supply as badly as they did in the place being evacuated.
With EVs, the problem of what happens a battery’s worth of range from danger isn’t as easy to solve. Because there is even less spare charging capacity, and all of the people who normally need to charge at home suddenly need to use public chargers, there will be some pretty horrific bottlenecks as more and more people drive EVs.
Now, to be absolutely clear, for most EVs there’s enough range to be out of mortal danger before this becomes a problem. But, having a huge number of drivers facing days-long charging lines is going to still present a smaller humanitarian crisis if we don’t make some plans to help alleviate the problem.
Some Ideas To Provide Surge Charging Capacity For Evacuations
The role of federal authorities (including FEMA, but also the Department of Defense and others) is to assist state and local governments in dealing with disaster. There are also state-to-state and international arrangements for aid that simplify and expedite the rendering of aid. With a disaster that we can see possibly coming (like a hurricane), it’s not unusual at all to pre-position resources and aid workers that will predictably be needed.
Because EV charging infrastructure will not be up to the task, it makes heaps of sense to have some extra capacity that can be moved around and put in the line of an anticipated evacuation.
The obvious way to do this is something we already see Tesla do when it anticipates holiday weekends and other events overwhelming the Supercharger network: