Tim Hortons owner Ken Coughlin is pleased to announce that an electric car charging station will soon be operational at one of his franchise locations.
Coughlin says the Drury Street location, situated in view of the Highway 11/17 Bypass seems like a natural place for a station, especially because the north only has a smattering of the 500 charging stations promised by the government.
Electric car owners wishing to travel beyond southern Ontario have found stations to be too spaced out for efficient trips. For some time the only Level 3 charging station in the region was in New Liskeard. Level 3 stations operate at 480 volts and take from 30 minutes to one hour to fully re-charge a standard sized vehicle.
Coughlin believes the Drury Street site will be the second public charging station in North Bay and lists the Ramada Pinewood Park Resort as having the other. There will be a fee involved with the charging station at the Tim Hortons, as there is at the Ramada. Coughlin says it is still much cheaper to charge a vehicle than filling the tank with gas. The Best Western also has a smaller set-up reserved for guests, but a representative did say the hotel would help out travellers in a pinch.
The City of North Bay has previously announced a multi-million dollar Community Energy Park project that will be built in the parking lot between the YMCA and Memorial Gardens. The micro grid will heat the pool at the YMCA and reduce energy costs at the arena. The apparatus will also serve as a charging station for electric cars once completed in the spring of 2018.
Coughlin says that through his participation in the MTO program, he has also learned that new charging stations are being constructed outside of Sudbury and in Espanola, with another station ready to go online at the Scotia Bank in Mattawa around the same time as his location will, in the next few days.
