Charged up

Recently Hydro Quebec announced plans for extending their DCQC network to allow further EV road trips in la belle province. By the end of 2016, an EV will be able to travel from the Ontario border to Rivière-du-Loup (and beyond) completely stress-free. The problem, as identified in my previous post, is that the infrastructure hits the New Brunswick border and stops:

Source: AVEQ/HydroQuebec

Spaced every 45-70km like HydroQuebec's plan, the following stations could extend this network through New Brunswick on the Trans-Canada:

• Edmundston, Grand Falls, Florenceville, Woodstock, Nackawic, Fredericton, Jemseg, Havelock, Moncton, Sackville, Cape Jourimain

Continuing the network along Route 1 with stations in Sussex, Quispamsis, Lepreau, St. Stephen

And one in Welsford to connect Saint John to Fredericton.

Map of proposed DCQC network, showing my southern bias

Connections to current networks can be made by adding stations in:

• Cabano, QC to connect Edmundston to HydroQuebec's netowrk
• Beddington, ME to connect St. Stephen to the enormous US network
• Oxford, NS to connect Sackville (NB) to Truro and Halifax

Sixteen stations (+3 outside NB) would get us quite a network, but at $50-100k  per station it's unlikely that anyone is ready to step-up and cover the bill. A less ambitious network would start with stations every ~100km, which might create redundancy in the future, but gets the basic network setup:

A simple solution to cover the Trans-Canada through the province.

Six stations might be an easier sell to the public, and is still a respectable route for the time being. Three more stations in Hampton, Welsford and Cape Jourimain would round-out southern NB, and get you to PEI and NS.

Currently, Level 2 chargers overlap these locations a bit. The difference is speed: Level 2 is an overnight or all-day affair (4-8 hours), where DCQC is more like filling up with gasoline (admittedly while also grabbing a coffee and a bathroom break) at 30 minutes. This means long distance road trips become logistically easy, compared to the haphazard method of charging in campgrounds and homes. However, chargers at hotels in Fredericton, Moncton, Grand falls, Edmundston, and Woodstock shift the priority to getting stations in Coles Island (Sussex if you want to cover Route 1 at the same time) and Perth-Andover/Florenceville. Welsford seems like a no-brainer between Fredericton and Saint John, it's also the station that would be most useful to me (hint, hint).

Food security - what does it even mean?

I was born in a Jewish-Russian family in the USSR, early '80s. We were lucky that my parents decided to leave the USSR and managed to do so in the very early '90s, just before the collapse of the USSR. People that stayed had to live through a very tough period of time, when they were not paid for months (despite performing their work as usual), and even if they were paid, there was hardly anything to buy. Many had to grow vegetables at their cottages, if they had those, or in random forest or abandoned city lots just as a means to survive.

Even growing up, before the actual collapse, there were continuous shortages of food. To be fair, a lot of those shortages began in the '80s, when I was born. Nothing we thought of as abnormal, since that was all we knew. Mandarins were available only around Christmas time and were considered a delicacy and one of the "must have" presents for the kids. I remember loving bananas, probably mainly since they were not freely available. Come fall, we would make huge batches of sauerkraut, buy and put away in the root cellar a whole whackload of potatoes for the winter, pickle tomatoes and cucumbers, pick berries and make jams, pick mushrooms and pickle and dry them. Even living in a large, industrial city (Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, formerly Yekaterinburg), having that root cellar full of vegetables and preserved food likely meant a less stressful winter.

In Canada, people have been lulled by the constant presence of huge amounts of food. Here people don't think about how they're going to go through the winter, because there's a constant supply of produce from around the world. While that gives one peace of mind, it also means that we eat out of season, amply support the oil industry, and can get swept away by the effect of globalization on supply and pricing, which also drives the smaller farmers out of work globally. One example is the sharp increase in food price in general, and rice price in particular in 2007-2008. As an affluent country, Canada probable didn't really notice, but others certainly did. How long will this buffer of affluence protect Canadians from fluctuating and rising food prices?

One of the things that reminded me of this recently was the price of almonds. I used to buy them in large bags, ~ $11/1 kg, which is outrageously cheap. Overnight, those bags became $22. It took me a while to figure it out, but then I remembered that California provides a staggering 82% of the world's almonds, and California is having a VERY rough time. And almonds are just a very small example.

So what does food security mean to me, personally? Food security to me means that we know where our next year's worth of food comes from. It means that the availability of our food will not be based on whether grain-exporting countries are supporting biofuel instead of feeding their people or the price of oil. Specifically, Josh and I feel that we have to eat much more locally (otherwise, we fall into the globalization rabbit hole), and that requires some imagination and will power during the cold Canadian winters. I will be buying as much as I can locally (farmers' markets and potentially CSA) and try to grow and put away as much food as I can for the winter. This winter, we had 30 liters of home-made plum jam, 10-20 liters of different salsas, and 20 liters of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers to keep us happy. I hope that as we get better at things, our pantry will look closer to this: