EV charging corridor from Yellowknife to the south ‘ready in March’

A series of chargers making electric vehicle travel easier between Yellowknife and southern Canada will be ready for use in March, the GNWT says.

Fast chargers in Yellowknife and Hay River are already available. The Department of Infrastructure says work on chargers in Behchokǫ̀, Fort Smith, Fort Providence and Enterprise should be complete by March 31.

“The completion of that corridor would cover most daily uses, certainly for people who want to travel between Yellowknife and Hay River or Fort Smith,” said NWT energy policy and programs manager Remi Gervais.

Gervais said the distance between Enterprise and High Level fast chargers means trips to and from Alberta still require longer-range electric vehicles, but are achievable.

“Looking forward, we’ll want to make that easier,” he said.

“By March 31, most of the daily travel in the Northwest Territories [segment of the corridor] should be covered. After that, it might take a few more years to figure out making the travel between Alberta and the Northwest Territories a little bit more accessible to more electric vehicles.”

One planned charging station at Buffalo Junction in the South Slave is “delayed due to civil construction issues,” the department said, and won’t be complete by March 31, but will be finished at some point in the 2025-26 financial year.

‘Without the corridor, it was unrealistic’

Electric vehicle technology continues to improve and has conquered the previous concern that cars would simply die or have their range limited to the point of uselessness in the northern winter cold.

In similarly chilly Norway, for example, nine out of 10 new vehicles sold last year were electric according to recent BBC reporting, even as Norway’s wealth as a nation has been largely derived from oil and gas.

But infrastructure is the remaining big hurdle for electric vehicles in the NWT.

Opening a corridor of fast “level three” chargers along some of the territory’s highways will be a significant step forward, said Jeremy Flatt, who was an early adopter of an electric vehicle in Yellowknife.

“Newer vehicles have a 400 or 500-km range, maybe a 250-km range in the depths of winter. So it’s much more realistic for somebody with a 2022 or onwards vehicle to consider a long drive from one community to another,” he said.

“Without that charging corridor in place, it was really unrealistic to try and drive to somewhere like Hay River.”

“I think it’s a big deal,” said Gervais.

“You’re essentially facilitating people now using locally produced energy for their daily travel. Even if they don’t travel daily between communities, most of the impact of those chargers will be in people now having electric vehicles and using them for their daily commute within communities.

“There’s lots of local energy now that could be used by that. The economic impacts and environmental impacts are certainly significant.”

In some cases, that local energy might end up being diesel, negating the environmental gain. However, the South Slave’s Taltson hydro plant is due to come back online within the next month. In ordinary circumstances, once a transmission line project involving Fort Providence is complete, the key chargers along the corridor will be powered by hydro.

Increasing power sales to electric vehicle owners is one means by which the NWT Power Corporation has envisaged growing its customer base and its revenue.

Without huge new industrial projects on the horizon and with the territory’s population fairly static, the power corporation has had trouble identifying new customers as fuel and maintenance costs increase. A large-scale shift to electric vehicles, while likely to take decades, would represent income for northern power companies that previously went to gasoline giants.

Flatt said some of the NWT’s new chargers can fill the battery of his older electric car in 15 minutes, and maybe the battery of a newer one in half an hour.

“A 20-minute charge on one of those things would give you hundreds of kilometres of driving range,” he said, comparing the stop to the length of time it takes to buy and eat a sandwich at a gas station. “That would be pretty exciting.”

With a corridor of fast chargers in place, he said, “I would absolutely get a new electric vehicle as my next vehicle.”

“Until now, I had said it was not realistic to drive all the way down south in an EV. When we had the evacuation, would I have taken my EV? Probably not. But the fast charging corridor would certainly change that. EVs wouldn’t be just for your two-car families,” said Flatt.

“Electric vehicles are not going anywhere. The technology is spreading all around the world, the technology is improving, batteries are going to be charged more efficiently. They’re going to be better in the cold, all of that sort of stuff. The sooner we get this infrastructure, the sooner we start getting some value out of it.”