Is Canada’s infrastructure prepared for the electric vehicle boom?

By 2035 all cars, SUVs and light trucks sold in Canada must be electric, a goal experts describe as an ambitious one by the federal government as part of its plan to decarbonize the transportation sector and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

But will Canada’s infrastructure be able to handle all of these new electric vehicles?

There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer, as experts in the automotive and green energy industries say there are several factors to consider.

According to the federal government’s data, electric vehicles only made up 5.3 per cent of all vehicles, or 86,000 vehicles, in Canada in 2021.

The Liberal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan outlines an increase of up to 395,000 new Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) sales in 2026; 1.2 million ZEVs in 2030; and a whopping 1.2 million ZEVs sold in 2035 — which translates to 5 per cent, 16 per cent and 40 per cent of all ZEVs on the road, respectively.

There are several elements to improving Canada’s electric vehicle infrastructure. The most obvious is the need for a dramatic increase in charging stations, of which the federal government has committed over $1 billion to build 84,000 over the next four years.

Daniel Breton, the president of Electric Mobility Canada, a national not-for-profit working to advance electric mobility in Canada, said one of the main issues today in electric vehicle infrastructure is that there just aren’t enough of them for sale.

“Canadian consumers want to buy electric vehicles,” Breton said, “but they’re really hard to come by. That is why we think we need more infrastructure for electric vehicles and we need to make sure that the infrastructure is reliable.”

A new Volkswagen ‘gigafactory’ assembling electric vehicle batteries in St. Thomas, Ont. is expected to begin production in 2027, creating up to 3,000 jobs in the region.

A General Motors plant, just 50 kilometres away from the Volkswagen factory in Ingersol, Ont. converted their facility into Canada’s first full-scale electric vehicle manufacturer. By 2025, the plant is expected to make 50,000 electric vehicles a year.

CHARGING

Charging an electric vehicle at home may sound simple: you plug your car into an outlet and let the battery charge. But it’s a little more complicated than that.

According to Natural Resources Canada, there are three ways to charge an electric vehicle.

The first, Level 1, is when you use your vehicle’s portable cord and plug it into a standard 120 volt wall socket. This is the slowest speed — it will get you about 3 kilometres to 8 kilometres of juice for every hour it’s left charging.

The second level requires electric vehicle owners to install a Level Two charging station in their homes. A Level 2 charger will get you 16 kilometres to 97 kilometres of energy per hour charged. But Level 2s require more electricity voltage, about the same as a stove or air conditioner might — 208 to 240 volts.

And a Level 3 charger is a “DC charger that provides the fastest charging time,” Natural Resources of Canada says on their website, but these are typically found in public places and businesses.

Most electric vehicle owners opt to install Level 2 chargers in their homes because they work faster and more efficiently, but many homes in Canada are built with older 100 volt electrical grids, which put out significantly less electricity than a 240 volt grid.

When homeowners already have their stoves, fridge, air conditioners and other mega-electricity consumers plugged into their electrical grids, charging an electric vehicle at the same time may overload it and burn it out.

But Kevin Lisso, the CEO and co-founder of the Toronto-based green energy company EnerSavers, says many chargers today are equipped with a load management system, where the charger is smart enough to find the remaining power on the grid, whether it be 10 available volts or 40 volts, and it won’t overload the system.

“It will charge your car a little bit slower for 20 amps, but then as soon as you go to bed at night and your washing machine is off, your dryer turns off, the air conditioning is off, then all of a sudden you have all of this power available, and the charger will find it and use it because it has load management built into it,” Lisso said.

According to the Government of Canada, there are over 20,000 publicly available charging stations in Canada today.

ELECTRIC GRIDS

Charging at home may work for many electric vehicle owners now, but Canada’s electrical grid infrastructure will need a significant overhaul when thousands more electric vehicles are on the road.

According to a study by the Canadian Climate Institute, the move away from fossil fuels to clean energy in electricity consumption will put much more strain on Canada’s electrical grid, especially during ‘peak hours,’ between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., when most people get home from work start using their appliances. This is also a prime time to plug in their cars to charge for the night.

In a study by Claude El-Bayeh, a University of Concordia postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he and his colleagues found that if too many electric vehicles charge at the same time, “it will create a lot of problems for the network and perhaps cause a blackout,” said El-Bayeh in the study.

“Instead of improving the stability of the network and reducing pollution by using EVs, you’ll have the reverse effect.”

One of the suggestions the study makes is to utilize batteries that are bidirectional, where “the vehicle discharges power from its battery back into the grid.” This will allow vehicles to store more energy than they need. When a bidirectional battery is plugged into a socket, it can feed electricity back into the grid, powering buildings and homes and easing the tension put on Canada’s electrical system.

Today, many provinces are rolling out studies and testing their electrical infrastructure. In Alberta, FortrisAlberta, an electricity distribution provider for the province, offered customers who owned electric vehicles up to $250 to sign up for a study based on their car’s charging data.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES ARE HEAVY

Another major issue with electric vehicles is that they’re significantly heavier than gas-powered vehicles.

“It’s a matter of physics,” said David Adams, the president of the Global Automakers of Canada. “The batteries are extremely heavy and the vehicles are extremely heavy.”

Adams explained that the larger the vehicle, the bigger and heavier the battery will have to be to power it, which makes it even more dangerous to cars on the road. He added that the tires for electric vehicles are also heavier than combustion engine vehicles because they are built to sustain the weight of the battery.

This added weight will put more strain on our roads. It also makes it much more dangerous for gas-powered vehicles when an electric vehicle and a gas-powered car collide.

In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that if a vehicle weighs 1,000 pounds more than another vehicle, it results in a 47 per cent increase in fatality risk.

Earlier this year, the National Transportation Safety Board in the U.S. raised concerns over the increasing weight of electric trucks and Hummers, saying, “We have to be careful that we aren’t also creating unintended consequences: More death on our roads…[s]afety, especially when it comes to new transportation policies and new technologies, cannot be overlooked.”