What If A Hurricane Comes & You Solely Have An Electrical Automotive? – CleanTechnica – TechnoNews

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After studying Jennifer’s glorious article on the flood hearth threat with EVs associated to hurricanes, I assumed I might additionally current the optimistic facet of getting an EV as a serious hurricane is headed towards your own home. As somebody who has lived in Tampa for 33 years, I do know that with each storm, it’s a must to determine when you and your loved ones are staying or going.

In case you are staying, it’s a must to purchase provides and safe your own home. In case you are going, it’s a must to pack and know the place you’ll. On Monday, as I used to be placing up shutters on my townhome and serving to some neighbors that didn’t have an enormous ladder, my brother-in-law made a reservation for us in Fort Pierce.

We had been additionally going to order a spot in southern Georgia, however didn’t due to a miscommunication, however fake we did for the sake of this text. We didn’t know if we had been going to make use of it, however with Milton’s winds gusting as much as 220 mph, we needed an choice to get out of Dodge (Tampa). That was out of the cone. We deliberate to take 2 automobiles, one fuel and my lengthy vary Tesla Mannequin Y. It’s important to make your reservations early, as a result of by the point you need to go away, all of the locations are both booked up or they’ve tripled their costs (I help the value system and don’t think about than unhealthy “price gouging” however simply essentially the most environment friendly option to allocate scarce sources to those that worth it essentially the most). So on Tuesday when it was time to both go away or keep (primarily based on up to date climate forecasts), I wanted to examine if the Superchargers would all be overflowing with 2 hours waits, identical to my fossil fuel-loving buddies advised me can be the case when the “big one” was able to hit.

12 stalls accessible. Hmm, did I let you know that almost 2,000 fuel stations are out of gas? And most of the ones which have gas have HUGE traces?

8 stalls accessible. Might it’s that my fossil fuel-loving buddies acquired is all improper? That EV chargers are extra accessible than fuel when on the point of evacuate, and in addition alongside the best way? I captured these photos at 3:40PM on October eighth, mainly the height of individuals evacuating in Florida.

8 stalls accessible. I haven’t discovered one full but. Perhaps Tesla hasn’t given up on the Supercharger enterprise. Perhaps they had been prepared, even once they opened as much as different automakers’ automobiles.

10 stalls accessible. Let’s look east as an alternative of north.

12 stalls open in Davenport (near Disney).

8 stalls in an Orlando location.

8 stalls in Celebration. Do you know that this Disney-designed group is the embodiment of Epcot? Nicely, I assumed that, however researching that, it turned out to be a typical fable!

12 stalls in Sanford, sadly identified for Trayvon Martin’s loss of life.   

8 stalls accessible in Deltona. 

And 12 stalls accessible in one other Orlando location.

Florida has 172 Supercharger areas (second solely to California) and I wasn’t going to examine all of them. I couldn’t discover any that had been full. One other little bit of misinformation that’s generally unfold is that EVs will go away you stranded in a visitors jam within the winter chilly or summer time warmth. That isn’t true. They’re way more environment friendly than fuel automobiles and that effectivity benefit is much more pronounced in visitors jams which have prolonged idling and cease and go visitors that’s good for regenerative braking.

We Determined To Keep

Tesla despatched me this discover, which is try to provide house owners extra info on methods to keep away from the fires which have been occurring with the latest hurricanes.

As we had been working many errands, main as much as the storm, we appreciated that we weren’t utilizing up the precious fuel our neighbor’s had been, since every day we refilled our battery as much as run extra errands. Our neighbors with fuel automobiles needed to both not run the errands they needed to run or use a lot of their fuel or spend hours in traces topping off their tanks, none of these is a good possibility.

A lot of them additionally had been getting fuel for his or her turbines. My neighbor spent hours making an attempt to get his generator to work, shopping for fuel and a brand new spark plug and nonetheless couldn’t get it to work. My electrical automobile is my generator. It holds 3 or 4 days of energy and if wanted, I can recharge it for extra days of use. As I defined in nice element on this article a yr in the past, the Tesla Mannequin Y could be very snug place to sleep 1 or 2 folks. If totally charged, it may possibly preserve you at a snug temperature for 3 or 4 days, cost your telephones and laptops, and even offer you web entry in case you have bought Premium Connectivity.

Conclusion

Though there are numerous benefits to each fuel and electrical automobiles in a storm scenario, I needed to cowl so a few of the benefits to having an EV over having a fuel automobile. I hope you may share this with individuals who don’t suppose EVs are good in a storm scenario.

If you wish to make the most of my Tesla referral hyperlink to get Reward Credit, right here’s the hyperlink: https://ts.la/paul92237 — however as I’ve mentioned earlier than, if one other proprietor helped you extra, please use their hyperlink as an alternative of mine. If you wish to be taught extra about Tesla’s new referral program (August 2024), Chris Boylan has written an glorious article on it.

Disclosure: I’m a shareholder in Tesla [TSLA], BYD [BYDDY], Nio [NIO], XPeng [XPEV], Hertz [HTZ], NextEra Power [NEP], and a number of other ARK ETFs. However I provide no funding recommendation of any type right here.