Mayor scoots about town in an all-electric BMW loaned to him so hydro can collect data.

News 100 greenBy Pepper Parr

December 20, 2015

BURLINGTON, ON

The parking spots outside city hall are not actually assigned to specific members o council but they each have habits and the Mayor tends to take the one closest to the building – he also tends to back is car in.

Late last week the Mayor was scooting across the parking lot while I was having a conversation with Councillor Taylor. The Mayor didn’t head for the car the city provides him as Mayor for the city – he headed for a small but very smart looking BMW.

BMW hydro vehicle

Smart little BMW being loaned out to people that will allow Burlington Hydro to collect usage data. Mayor was one of the earlier experimenters.

Councillor Taylor mentioned something about getting to use the car sometime in the future – that was when the Mayor explained that the car was the property of Burlington Hydro – it was an all-electric vehicle that was being loaned out to various people to learn more about their driving habits. Along with the all-electric car there was an EV charging station where the user of the car could “fill-up”.

Burlington Hydro realizes that electric cars are becoming more popular and they need to ensure that the electricity grid that feeds hydro to our homes can manage the additional load that electric cars will place on the system.

Dan Guatto, a vice president and the COO for Burlington Hydro explained that each transformer on the streets of Burlington could probably handle as many as seven electric cars if the owners had EV charging stations in their homes.

And that is where hydro expects people to get the electricity they need into those cars.

BMW hydro EV charging device

Electric vehicle charging station in city hall parking lot.

The EV charging stations however are not just a big battery that put electricity into a car – they are actually “smart” EV chargers that are tied into the North American electricity grid with enough computing power to be programmed and managed the flow of electricity into the electric car and to manage the flow out of the car as well.

Guatto explains that the managing of the electricity is a significant challenge – the grid that we have in place wasn’t built for this added demand. So we have to manage the process of charging all those cars – ideally he added we would like to use nuclear generated electricity that we call upon late at night when it is least expensive.

The task right now is to determine what the demand I going to be – and the start of that process is to have the Mayor and other members of council driving the BMW while all the data is recorded and analyzed.

The Gazette doesn’t recall getting a media release from the city on this really interesting initiative – had we not spotted the Mayor getting out of the BMW we would never have learned about the program.

The city did have an EV charging station installed at the city parking lot on Locust Street and there was one of those infamous photo-ops done.

What has us scratching our heads is – why wouldn’t the Mayor want the citizens of the city to know about the program. It certainly fits into the Community Energy Plan that the Mayor loves to talk about.

One political wag suggested the Mayor didn’t want to have to explain to the public why he was driving a BMW leased by hydro. The Gazette would love to see the Mayor championing this initiative – it a great one.

The Gazette did suggest that its publisher might be able to help with the gathering of useful data if he had access to the BMW for a period of time – there was no response to that idea.

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1 comment to Mayor scoots about town in an all-electric BMW loaned to him so hydro can collect data.

  • Tom Muir

    I heard rumors that the Mayor’s office is in a mess, and this appears to be an example.

    The Mayor has a communications office, but where are they on this initiative?

    The electric car trial is a good idea and it’s not something the Mayor should be embarrassed about, in my opinion.