At the Level 2 charter at Zarowny Motors in St. Paul, Alberta, about 200 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.Jason Tchir/The Globe and Mail
The free Level 2 electric vehicle charger at Zarowny Motors in St. Paul, Alta., a farming town around 200 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, has been there for nearly a decade. It’s slow, but it gets steady use.
“We use it to charge our courtesy shuttle, which is a Mach-E,” said Amanda Zarowny Pawlyk, the Ford and Lincoln dealership’s general manager. “There are people here in town with EVs and we see more EVs when we have big tournaments.”
St. Paul, home to more than 6,200 people, has a Canadian Tire, a Best Buy Express and a Tim Hortons. Yet, like many Alberta towns its size, it lacks a DC fast charger.
While a fast charger can add significant range to most EVs in less than 30 minutes, a Level 2 charger can take hours.
“There was someone who stopped here in a Tesla that was nearly dead,” Pawlyk said. “Her daughter came from Edmonton to pick her up. They left it charging here overnight and came back the next day to get it.”
As of March 2025, the most recent year with available numbers, there were nearly 20,000 battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) registered in Alberta.
According to Natural Resources Canada, Canada has 2,735 public DC fast-charging stations. Alberta is home to 178 of them, up from about 40 at the end of 2022. However, the province lags well behind British Columbia’s 604, Ontario’s 693, and Quebec’s network of 885 stations.
Drivers can get to almost anywhere in the province in most EVs without getting stranded, but it requires careful planning – especially in winter when EVs lose significant range.
“North of Edmonton, we’d say it’s pretty sparse,” said Andrew Bell, founding director of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta. “We’ve got members up in Fort McMurray and they’ve made the journey to Edmonton [432 kilometres away], but they’ve got to plan it out a bit.”
Next to St. Paul, Alberta's UFO landing pad.Jason Tchir/The Globe and Mail
Plan E?
There are route-planning websites and apps to help map out trips, but they often guide drivers onto specific paths rather than the routes they actually want to take.
Last month, I took my mom from just outside Edmonton to St. Paul for lunch (it’s her hometown) in a 2026 Lexus RZ 450e – a roughly 380-kilometre round trip in a car with around 415 kilometres of estimated range.
One app told me to take Highway 28 – a busy route I try to avoid – and stop at a fast charger in Smoky Lake, a town about halfway there, for a 20-minute top-up.
I didn’t stick to the plan. Instead, I did what I’d do in a gas car: I chose the quiet back roads and just started driving.
We arrived in St. Paul with the dashboard showing 182 kilometres of range – just short of the 185 kilometres needed to get home.
The town doesn’t have a municipal charger and I wasn’t certain if the charger at Zarowny Motors was open to the public.
When we pulled up next to it, there was no sign, so I went inside to ask if we could use it. Pawlyk told me it was fine but asked me to leave my phone number on a sticky note in case they needed the spot.
Lincoln required dealerships to install the charger years ago, “even though Lincoln doesn’t have a full-electric car,” she said.
Because the charger’s not part of a commercial network, there’s no easy way to make users pay for it, she said.
“It’s here for people to use. If people started to abuse it, we might shut it off at times,” Pawlyk said. “We had one gentleman in town who was charging his EV here every night – and he didn’t buy it from us. We had to ask him not to.”
We charged for about 90 minutes while we had lunch, regaining 50 kilometres of range. We drove back the way we came and made it home with 60 kilometres to spare.
That was better range than the car had predicted, meaning we could have completed the trip without charging at all – but I didn’t want to take the chance.
After the drive, I learned that a new solar-powered fast charger had opened in Two Hills – a town along our route – just a few weeks earlier. It still isn’t showing up on the route-planning app.
The Lexus RZ parked just outside Edmonton.Jason Tchir/The Globe and Mail
Charging ahead?
Pawlyk has considered installing a fast charger, but it’s a big investment – and would need steady use to justify the cost.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem,” said Scott Lundy, a spokesman for Alberta Municipalities.
Upfront costs for the equipment and installation can range from $100,000 to well over $1-million, Lundy said.
Ottawa offers a federal grant that covers up to 46 per cent of costs up to $100,000, but in Alberta, there’s a waiting list.
And there are also operation costs, including potentially “astronomical” power bills, Pawlyk said.
Cold Lake, a city of nearly 18,000 people located about 120 kilometres northeast of St. Paul, had to hike charging fees for its two fast chargers this year because it was losing money. In 2025, the city took in more than $5,000 in gross revenue from them. But it paid more than $15,000 for power – roughly $2,000 for the electricity and more than $13,000 in distribution fees.
A 2024 online survey of Alberta EV owners by the Canadian Automobile Association revealed that 87 per cent of respondents said they would buy an EV again – but only 53 per cent were satisfied with their fast-charging experience.
Because most new EVs deliver at least 400 kilometres of range, some prospective EV buyers overestimate how often they’ll need a fast charger, Bell said.
“On an annual basis, I may use a fast charger two or three times – that’s it,” Bell said. “I charge at home.”
Not just for the city?
Even in rural areas without public chargers, owning an EV can still make sense. They can work for drivers who don’t regularly travel hundreds of kilometres in a day – or as a second vehicle just for local driving, Bell said.
“There are people in rural areas crunching the math and, for some, it works really well," he said. “They’re doing a lot of local commutes. We have one member who does local towing and he’s saved $6,000 a month not buying gas.”
Despite some skepticism online, Bell said most people he meets in person are curious about EVs. “Albertans like technology and they like saving money,” he said. “People need to get behind the wheel and try them. Once they’ve driven one, it’s very convincing.”
In St. Paul, Pawlyk has sold three Ford F-150 Lightnings and two Mach-Es – and has had people asking about when she’ll be getting Ford’s next-generation electric truck.
But Pawlyk said the Lincoln Corsair plug-in hybrid (PHEV) has sold well. Its roughly 40-kilometre electric range lets people drive as an EV around town while keeping a gas engine for longer trips, she said.
“We don’t have enough stoplights in town for a conventional hybrid to recharge the battery,” she said.
While PHEVs have wider general appeal in town, Pawlyk was surprised by who is showing the most interest in BEVs.
“It’s the older generation,” she said. “The guy who has the [BEV] out on the highway here is a farmer in his late 70s. He’s taking it to a wedding in Edmonton this weekend, with no fear about how he’s going to charge it.”