Fueling Up The Day After Milton Pounds The Florida Coast, Electric Versus Gas

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Yesterday, I wrote about having only an electric car as a powerful storm was powering toward my family’s home. I looked at the implications if you are evacuating and if you are staying. We decided to stay. Luckily for us, the storm slightly weakened and turned slightly south, saving our home from a direct hit. Even though Tampa Bay avoided a direct hit, almost 600,000 customers lost power at home in our service area.

How Was It For Tesla Owners That Needed To Charge?

A pretty good situation. About a third of the chargers show “Temporary Closure” as their status (the ones with a circle and slash). Time will tell when they will come back, but I expect them to reopen as soon as power is restored and power to be restored in a day or two. Tesla could avoid the closures by having Megapacks either permanently or temporarily at locations that have impending hurricanes, but Tesla didn’t do that (as far as I know). I didn’t need to charge (since I had charged to 95% before my power went out), but I charged twice to top off my car and gather intelligence for this article.

The first time I charged about noon, I got the last stall, so I didn’t have to wait. I spoke to a few owners who said they usually just charged at home, but since they didn’t have electricity at home, they were Supercharging.

The Wawa station had gas pumps and food, but the gas pumps weren’t open. I assume they didn’t have gas, since they clearly had electricity to run their chargers and store.

I went back at 6pm and had to wait 5 minutes to charge.

You can see the chargers are MUCH busier than before the hurricane, for 3 reasons.

As mentioned above, people who usually charge at home are using them.
People are using their car batteries to provide air conditioning and charge laptops and phones.
People that have both gas cars and electric cars are putting most of their miles on their electric cars, since the fuel is both cheaper (which isn’t unique to the hurricane) and more available (the point of this article).

How Was It For Gas Car Owners Who Needed To Fill Up?

I already mentioned that Wawa didn’t have gas.

This station close to my brother-in-law’s house also was out (I forgot to take a picture of the station by my house, but it would be closed too).

This 7-11 had food but no fuel.

I figured I should use an app to look around more efficiently than driving all around.

No gas here.

None here either.

None here either. I just checked my zip code, but it looks like you will have to drive a while to find gas, and maybe wait in line. There is increased demand for gas, since many people use it to power generators in addition to vehicle use.

Conclusion

Although there are many advantages to both gas and electric cars in a storm situation, I wanted to cover 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.