Natural disasters, severe weather present EV charging challenge

Record heat waves in California and severe hurricanes in Florida point to a weakness in electric vehicle adoption: How do people charge during extreme weather events when power may be lost?

It's not a theoretical question. California leads the nation in EVs. During a record Labor Day heat wave, state officials asked EV owners to avoid charging during peak electricity use times to avert power outages.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Ian landed as a Category 4 storm on Florida's southwest coast and knocked out power for weeks in the hardest hit areas.

As EV adoption grows, charging before, during and after natural disasters presents a challenge, especially given a shortage of public chargers, lack of access to home charging and the increasing regularity of such events.

"We're starting to see the impacts of climate change more and more frequently," said Katherine Stainken, vice president of policy for the Washington, D.C., trade group Electrification Coalition.

Natural disasters often create mass evacuations for which people require reliable transportation. With hurricanes and tropical storms, people have days to evacuate. But there may be no notice in some instances such as fast-moving fires or catastrophic earthquakes. If the same events knock out electricity, EV owners' efforts to leave may be hampered.

While it's common to see lines at gas stations during a hurricane evacuation, storms could create bottlenecks at public charging stations because of the time required to charge an electric vehicle.

That could pose dangerous consequences for EV owners, said Eleftheria Kontou, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kontou, co-author of "Evacuation Route Planning for Alternative Fuel Vehicles," published in the October edition of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, said evacuations don't account for charging electric vehicles.

"Emergency management agencies should design routes to shelters and safe zones that include charging stations," Kontou said.

Emergency officials and charging providers also need to communicate evacuation plans to EV drivers, including developing information campaigns and maps, she said.

"Emergency planners should collaborate closely with charging infrastructure providers and utilities and identify locations that are critical for charging during evacuations," Kontou said.

Charging network EVgo saw an increase in activity ahead of Hurricane Ian in southwest and central Florida, said Jonathan Levy, the company's chief commercial officer. The increase, measured in kilowatt-hours dispensed, was more than 40 percent in Orlando and around 20 percent in Tampa, he said.

Other networks didn't see the same activity.

ChargePoint said it did not see a significant increase in charging sessions prior to the storm.

On Sept. 28, the day the hurricane made landfall, there was a 41 percent decrease in EV charging sessions across the company's 8,000-plus charging ports in Florida.

ChargePoint and EVgo didn't provide information on whether their chargers were offline during or after the storm and whether they were back up and running. Their service maps and third-party charging-station information providers PlugShare and Chargemap show that most stations in the area hit by Hurricane Ian are now back in service.

Power outages immediately after a hurricane can make both gasoline and EV charging stations inoperable, said Genevieve Cullen, president of the Washington, D.C., trade group Electric Drive Transportation Association.

"When there's a power outage, gas pumps don't work either," she said.

But EV owners might find charging opportunities faster than internal combustion engine drivers can find open gas stations.

"Unlike with a gas station, you can access electricity in a lot of places," Cullen said.

EVs and some hybrids might help support the grid during a natural disaster.

A deadly cold snap that hit Texas in 2021 left more than 4.5 million homes and businesses without power for days. A handful of owners of Ford F-150 hybrid pickups with the PowerBoost feature used the truck's onboard generator to power their homes for several days.

The all-electric version of the F-150 is available with an Intelligent Backup Power feature that allows for bi-directional charging to power a suburban home or small business. The feature is standard on higher-priced models with an extended-range battery and costs $500 as an over-the-air software upgrade on other models.

Ford's $1,310 Charge Station Pro home-charging station, which comes standard with the extended-range battery, is required. It serves as an interface when the truck is plugged in and sends power from its battery to a home. Also required is a $3,895 Home Integration System jointly developed by Ford and its preferred installation partner Sunrun.

Bidirectional flow enables vehicle-to-grid capability, allowing an EV to send excess power back to the power grid.

Kontou said she expects vehicle-to-grid technologies to grow with EV adoption.

"People are understanding that electric vehicles are more than just cars and trucks," Cullen said. "It's also the charging systems, storage, the grid and how they serve and reinforce each other."

Vehicle to grid also is being tested with larger EVs, including electric school buses.

"A lot of people are focused on electric school buses because they have a big battery, and for most of the day they're just sitting there," Stainken said.

Last year DTE Energy of Michigan conducted a pilot with six electric buses in two school districts to test vehicle-to-grid applications. Dominion Energy of Richmond, Va., plans to deploy more than 1,000 electric school buses in Virginia by 2025 for the same purpose.

Other large commercial vehicles, including semitractors and garbage trucks, are becoming electrified, said Rick Kozole, the Detroit-based leader of the automotive and industrials group at consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal.

"We can use those batteries for power after a natural disaster," he said.