Today was National Fiddling Day, an occasion for which we have Libbe Hubley to thank, as it was her Private Members Bill in the Senate that conjured it into being.
The day was marked here in Charlottetown with a rousing concert St Paul’s Anglican Church.
Just in case you were concerned that you might have missed a statutory holiday, An Act Respecting National Fiddling Day offers clarity on this point:
For greater certainty, National Fiddling Day is not a legal holiday or a non-juridical day.
We refilled this hand soap dispenser with Downeast Hand & Body Soap at Riverview Country Market for 98 cents. (the original bottle of Nature Clean soap cost more than $5.00).
At the end of our trip to South Melville yesterday, Trudy, whose Chevy Bolt I’d driven there and back, called up the “Range Impacts Since Last Full Charge” screen, which shows factors that influenced the range of the car:
The outside temperature last night was about 4ºC, which explains the 15 km loss there; it also explains why we lost 10 km from “climate settings,” as we needed to turn on the defroster a couple of times.
The 7 km loss from “elevation” can be explained by the hilly terrain between Charlottetown and South Melville:
The elevation between Charlottetown and South Melville, from PlugShare.com
The most interesting number–and the only one that I had any influence on–is “technique,” and it reflects my behaviour braking and accelerating. And my (essentially random) technique scored us an additional 4 km of range.
Earlier this morning Terry Howatt thoughtfully left a comment here about a meeting tonight of the PEI Electric Vehicle Association in South Melville.
As I’m curious about such things, and eager to learn more from people who aren’t try to sell me something, I dropped a line to my new friend Trudy (who also came to me by way of this blog) to see if she wanted to go to the meeting with me. Trudy is almost two months into her own experience as an electric vehicle owner: she purchased a Chevy Bolt at the end of May.
Trudy quickly wrote back, said she was game, and offered me a drive. When she showed up at my place at 5:45, she hopped out of the driver’s seat and offered me the opportunity to drive the Bolt, which I eagerly accepted.
When we arrived at Harry Smith’s house in South Melville we were greeted by three Nissan Leafs, a Tesla Model S, a Tesla Model 3, a homebrew SUV conversion, and another Bolt. And an enthusiastic group of EV owners and owners-to-be.
The proceedings were informal, the refreshments were well-turned-out, and the group proved generous and willing to answer my endless stream of questions.
Driving Trudy’s Bolt was a joy: it’s fun to drive, comfortable and roomy; after 20 minutes I forgot that I was driving an electric car.
If you’re interested in attending the next monthly meeting, or if you simply have questions about electric vehicles, you can contact the group by email at peieva2019@gmail.com.
Archdeacon John Clarke, Rector of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, in a blog post today:
That’s why it is important for the Church (our Church) to remain cautious about how we behave in the world, by what we buy, believe, support and protest. That’s why it is important for us to continue to do things like participating in the Pride Parade, either as participants or spectators, to show our support of several groups of people who are persecuted, in one way or another for no good reason.
It’s a little disconcerting, I must say, to see the crowds lining the streets of Charlottetown do a double-take when they see St. Paul’s Church in the Pride Parade. It is sad that only two churches participate in the Parade, because as along as people are persecuted, imprisoned and even sentenced to death due to their sexuality we have a responsibility to stand with, march with and celebrate with them until they enjoy freedom. The price of a guilty conscience is too much.
Pride PEI marks 25 years on PEI and this years Festival begins on July 20, and the Pride Parade is scheduled for July 27. The price of not being supportive is too much.
I’m proud to be the Church’s neighbour.
One of the more intriguing aircraft in the extended Air Canada family fleet is the Beechcraft 1900, operated by EVAS as Air Canada Express, and used on the short Charlottetown to Halifax run.
It is an almost universal experience of flying on one of these planes that a conversation strikes up among passengers, marveling at how Lilliputian they are. The planes have 18 seats, one on either side of the aisle, and although they’re small, they’re also tall, and thus surprisingly roomy.
In December 2015, Oliver and Ethan the Dog and I flew to Montreal via Halifax, and it was our first experience taking Ethan on the Beechcraft. Standard operating procedure for Ethan on airplanes is that he sits under the seat in front of Oliver; while that might have worked–it would have been tight, but he can curl up like a pretty tight ball of dog–the first officer, in making his rounds up and down the aisle (in lieu of a flight attendant), told us that Ethan was welcome to sit on the empty seat in front of Oliver.
And so he did.
He was wearing his car harness, and we tethered that to the airplane seatbelt, and he was perfectly content to keep an eye on Oliver from that perspective.
The newly-elected Green Official Opposition in Prince Edward Island is hiring three positions, with a closing date of May 22, 2019:
Here’s an comparison of the maps of Crapaud in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.
Here’s a a more detailed view of the centre of Crapaud:
In QGIS I created a new map, and then, under Layer > Data Source Manager > Browser, I added the OpenStreetMap layer and the Google Maps layer:
Toggling one off and one on, and the switeching, I made equal-sized screen shots of Crapaud and saved them as PNG files.
In the April 2019 Prince Edward Island general election both the Green Party and PC Party platforms promised to incentivize electric vehicle purchases (“Create a purchase incentive for electric vehicles” and “Develop a solar energy rebate and electric vehicle incentive program,” said the platforms, respectively); added to the recently announced federal inventive program, there might never be a better time to purchase a new electric vehicle on PEI.
If you can find a dealer to sell you one, that is.
The federal program covers vehicles from 14 manufacturers, but only Chevrolet, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan and Volkswagen have dealers in Charlottetown that sell battery-electric vehicles (as opposed to hybrids), and of those 6 makes:
In other words, although the federal government will rebate me $5000 for the purchase of a battery-electric vehicle, there’s not a single battery electric vehicle in Charlottetown that I can take for a test drive.
Transport Canada has a helpful page of resources on electric vehicles that includes a link to a map of charging stations.
The map includes a link to a developer API at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory; by signing up for a free API key you can get the information from the map as JSON or XML.
With the API key, this request will return all the charging stations on Prince Edward Island:
https://developer.nrel.gov/api/alt-fuel-stations/v1.json?fuel_type=ELEC&state=PE&country=CA&format=JSON&api_key=[API KEY GOES HERE]
The API returns JSON. If I want to convert that to GeoJSON, I can use JavaScript:
var getJSON = require('get-json')
var GeoJSON = require('geojson');
getJSON('https://developer.nrel.gov/api/alt-fuel-stations/v1.json?fuel_type=ELEC&state=PE&country=CA&format=JSON&api_key=[API KEY GOES HERE]', function(error, response){
var stations = GeoJSON.parse(response.fuel_stations, { Point: ['latitude', 'longitude'] });
console.log(JSON.stringify(stations));
});
The API returns 25 charging stations from Prince Edward Island (as of May 13, 2019); normalizing the data, there are 21 unique locations.
Visualizing them on a map, it becomes clear that they are concentrated in Summerside and Charlottetown, with none west of Cape Egmont nor east of Montague (it seems like an unrealized public relations and tourism opportunity to not have partially wind-powered EV station at North Cape and Hermanville).
I’m posting this both to get a May 2019 baseline that we can compare to as EV charging becomes more widespread, and with hope that others will use the open data that Transport Canada is helpfully providing.
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, see things I’ve favourited elsewhere, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
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