St. Albert crews hope some armour plating will stop thieves from stealing its electric vehicle charging cables.
In early November, St. Albert Public Works crews replaced 12 EV charging cables that had been cut from stations at Servus Place, St. Albert Place, and Fountain Park Recreation Centre last summer.
All six St. Albert Place stations were now operational, as were two of the six at Fountain Park and four of the eight at Servus, said Gage Tweedy, municipal energy specialist with the City of St. Albert. The city restored these cables to encourage more people to drive electric vehicles.
City environmental manager Meghan Myers said crews focused on the St. Albert Place stations as they were the most popular of the 26 run by the city, with some of them used daily. The city hoped to recoup the cost of the cables through insurance. (The cost to repair the St. Albert Place stations was previously pegged at $2,795.)
Tweedy said the city has launched a $2,400 pilot project to see if it can harden these cables against theft. The city has ordered black steel-lined sleeves from the U.S. company CatStrap that will clamp onto the cables and make them more difficult to cut. St. Albert and the City of Leduc are the first communities in Canada to try the sleeves.
The sleeves should be in place by January, Myers said. If the armoured cables survive for six months without being cut, the city will likely roll out the sleeves to the rest of the city’s stations.
“We’re hoping they don’t get cut and stolen again,” Tweedy said.
Tweedy said there weren’t many effective ways to guard EV cables against theft. Cameras can help, but have to be at just the right angle to provide useful information. (Cameras recorded the cable thefts from the Fountain Park stations last August, for example, but did not capture the license plate of the getaway vehicle.) St. Albert’s stations were already in high-visibility locations, and weren’t easy to move. The stations would have to be replaced entirely if the city switched to a “bring your own cable” system, as some parts of Europe have done.
Myers said the city has not had any further reports of cable thefts from its stations since August.
Information on St. Albert’s public EV chargers can be found at stalbert.ca/city/environment/energy-conservation/ev-charging-stations.