University of Waterloo was announced as the winning team for the 7th Annual Electric Mobility Canada (EMC) Student competition in Toronto the Electric Mobility National Conference. This year, students were challenged with the task of creating a short-term plan to make their campus ready for electric vehicles (EVs). The plan was to include all aspects of transportation electrification, such as charging infrastructure, electrification of campus fleet, EV outreach to students, professors, and staff, and grid load management.
The University of Waterloo team presented a plan that involved converting compact vehicles and sedans in the campus fleet to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and also installing electric charging stations at the General Service Complex building. These stations would be reserved for charging campus vehicles at night and open to staff and student EV owners during the day. Other creative ideas included partnership with Sustainable Campus Initiative (SCI), a student group focused on promoting sustainability on campus, and installing telematics devices in plug-in campus vehicles to analyze the impact of EV charging on the university’s grid load.
As the winning team, the University of Waterloo received a FLO charging station to install on campus. The team members include Anqi Luo, Audrey Avianto, Celine Chung, Christina Lee, Jane Su, Jihye Oh, Madhav Vasudev, and Nathan Lee from the Department of Chemical Engineering with faculty supervision from Prof. Michael Fowler, Chemical Engineering.