If the popularity of electric cars grows, London Hydro wants to be ready.
The hydro company is in the midst of collecting research on electric vehicles and wants to ensure it can cater to an increase of service demands if more Londoners start to use them.
"If there is a need for more electric services and it's something that's feasible for London Hydro to build into it's distribution system, it's certainly something we would look at," says Nancy Hutton, London Hydro's director of communications. "But we don't want to go to the point where we are building services before the demand is there."
London Hydro wants questions answered before they move forward.
"We've been looking very closely at individual charging characteristics and power quality aspects and making sure we really understand the impact on the electricity grid both in terms of consumption and how they turn on and off from a technical research point of view," says Luke Seewald, London Hydro's director of metering services.
Aside from the technical aspects, Hutton says they are looking into driver charging habits.
"What we want to know is what are the interest in electric vehicles in the London area and where customers might want to go with it in the future," says Hutton. "We need to know from a utility perspective how it fits into our core-business, is it something that we would support if customers wanted to have chargers for electric vehicles in their homes and what that would look like to our distribution centre."
London has electric charging stations that can be found at City Hall, Bud Gardens, London Hydro, Village Auto Care, Fanshawe College and at the TD Bank at Masonville.
Proponents of electric cars say they require less maintenance and use electricity generated in Ontario, rather than fuel imported from elsewhere.
Those looking for more information on electric vehicles in Ontario can visit www.plugndrive.ca.
**This story was written by Alec Ross, a student in the Broadcast Journalism program at Fanshawe College. Alec is currently performing an internship with BlackburnNews.com