What If A Hurricane Comes & You Only Have An Electric Car? – CleanTechnica

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After reading Jennifer’s excellent article on the flood fire risk with EVs related to hurricanes, I thought I would also present the positive side of having an EV as a major hurricane is headed toward your home. As someone who has lived in Tampa for 33 years, I know that with every storm, you have to decide if you and your family are staying or going.

If you are staying, you have to buy supplies and secure your home. If you are going, you have to pack and know where you are going to. On Monday, as I was putting up shutters on my townhome and helping some neighbors that didn’t have a big ladder, my brother-in-law made a reservation for us in Fort Pierce.

We were also going to reserve a place in southern Georgia, but didn’t because of a miscommunication, but pretend we did for the sake of this article. We didn’t know if we were going to use it, but with Milton’s winds gusting up to 220 mph, we wanted an option to get out of Dodge (Tampa). That was out of the cone. We planned to take 2 cars, one gas and my long range Tesla Model Y. You have to make your reservations early, because by the time you want to leave, all the places are either booked up or they have tripled their prices (I support the price system and do not consider than bad “price gouging” but just the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources to those who value it the most). So on Tuesday when it was time to either leave or stay (based on updated weather forecasts), I needed to check if the Superchargers would all be overflowing with 2 hours waits, just like my fossil fuel-loving friends told me would be the case when the “big one” was ready to hit.

12 stalls available. Hmm, did I tell you that nearly 2,000 gas stations are out of fuel? And many of the ones that have fuel have HUGE lines?

8 stalls available. Could it be that my fossil fuel-loving friends got is all wrong? That EV chargers are more available than gas when getting ready to evacuate, and also along the way? I captured these images at 3:40PM on October 8th, basically the peak of people evacuating in Florida.

8 stalls available. I haven’t found one full yet. Maybe Tesla hasn’t given up on the Supercharger business. Maybe they were ready, even when they opened up to other automakers’ vehicles.

10 stalls available. Let’s look east instead of north.

12 stalls open in Davenport (close to Disney).

8 stalls in an Orlando location.

8 stalls in Celebration. Did you know that this Disney-designed community is the embodiment of Epcot? Well, I thought that, but researching that, it turned out to be a common myth!

12 stalls in Sanford, unfortunately known for Trayvon Martin’s death.   

8 stalls available in Deltona. 

And 12 stalls available in another Orlando location.

Florida has 172 Supercharger locations (second only to California) and I wasn’t going to check them all. I couldn’t find any that were full. Another bit of misinformation that is commonly spread is that EVs will leave you stranded in a traffic jam in the winter cold or summer heat. That isn’t true. They are far more efficient than gas cars and that efficiency advantage is even more pronounced in traffic jams that have extended idling and stop and go traffic that is perfect for regenerative braking.

We Decided To Stay

Tesla sent me this notice, which is attempt to give owners more information on how to avoid the fires that have been happening with the recent hurricanes.

As we were running many errands, leading up to the storm, we liked that we weren’t using up the valuable gas our neighbor’s were, since each day we refilled our battery up to run more errands. Our neighbors with gas cars had to either not run the errands they wanted to run or use much of their gas or spend hours in lines topping off their tanks, none of those is a great option.

Many of them also were getting gas for their generators. My neighbor spent hours trying to get his generator to work, buying gas and a new spark plug and still couldn’t get it to work. My electric car is my generator. It holds 3 or 4 days of power and if needed, I can recharge it for more days of use. As I explained in great detail in this article a year ago, the Tesla Model Y is very comfortable place to sleep 1 or 2 people. If fully charged, it can keep you at a comfortable temperature for 3 or 4 days, charge your phones and laptops, and even give you internet access if you have purchased Premium Connectivity.

Conclusion

Although there are many advantages to both gas and electric cars in a storm situation, I wanted to cover so some of the advantages to having an EV over having a gas car. I hope you can share this with people who don’t think EVs are good in a storm situation.

If you want to take advantage of my Tesla referral link to get Reward Credits, here’s the link: https://ts.la/paul92237 — but as I have said before, if another owner helped you more, please use their link instead of mine. If you want to learn more about Tesla’s new referral program (August 2024), Chris Boylan has written an excellent article on it.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Tesla [TSLA], BYD [BYDDY], Nio [NIO], XPeng [XPEV], Hertz [HTZ], NextEra Energy [NEP], and several ARK ETFs. But I offer no investment advice of any sort here.