Electric cars are taking off in Australia. Charging stations are the next challenge

Take a drive through any Australian city and you start to notice them in unexpected places: behind fast-food outlets, the car parks of suburban pubs and shopping centres, even bolted to power poles along residential streets. Electric vehicle chargers have quietly become a part of the urban landscape, transforming everyday parking bays into spaces where a new generation of drivers doesn’t just stop to park, but also to power up.

Until recently, a shift on this scale might have seemed unthinkable. Australia was widely seen as a global laggard in the electric vehicle revolution, held back by limited model choice and high price tags compared with other markets. Consumers wrestled with important psychological barriers, too, questioning whether battery-powered cars had the power and the range to traverse the vast geography of a country like ours.

Today, those barriers have clearly broken down, and the market has turned with extraordinary speed. In June alone, Australians bought more than 30,000 electric vehicles – one in every four new cars sold nationwide. “In a good year, we used to be selling around 90,000 to 100,000 electric cars,” says Riz Akhtar, founder of electric vehicle data analytics firm Carloop. “The way things are averaging now, we are getting to the point where we are selling, in a quarter, what we used to sell in a year.”

The rapid shift is a major tailwind for efforts to slash exhaust-pipe emissions, which are polluting the atmosphere and dangerously heating the planet. But it is also exposing the next challenge in Australia’s energy transition that governments and companies must confront. The trouble is no longer convincing motorists to buy more electric vehicles, Akhtar explains, but ensuring the nation can build enough new charging spots – in the right places and in a fast-enough timeframe – to cater for them all.

“Public charging infrastructure is slowly getting there, but it’s nowhere near keeping up with the number of EVs hitting our roads,” he says. “I think we are going to be hit with a very strong wave of demand.”

There are more than 1300 public charging sites operational across Australia, housing more than 4000 individual charging ports, according to Swinburne University professor of transport technology and sustainability Hussein Dia. More than half are DC fast chargers rated above 50 kilowatts. Many of them are run by commercial operators such as Evie Networks, EVX, Chargefox and Tesla. Others are owned by service station chains like Shell, Ampol and BP, or motoring clubs like the NRMA and RACV.

While the global average seems to be 11 electric vehicles for every public charging point, many experts argue targeting such a ratio is not the best approach for Australia, nor may it be necessary. For one, it is unclear how many households will have the ability to charge at home, especially as more home energy technology becomes available, and retailers build more plans around vehicle charging. The Electric Vehicle Council last year reported up to 80 per cent of owners were charging at home at least twice a week already. Ensuring an expansive geographical spread of public chargers to eliminate remote black spots must also be a priority alongside the sheer number.

“If you live in a metro area or in south-eastern Australia, you are probably pretty well serviced; the real issue is regional areas, or for people who are travelling on road trips as there are stretches of road with no charger for 300 kilometres,” Dia says. “For me, addressing those gaps is more important than saying there needs to be a specific ratio of chargers per number of cars.”

Bernhard Conoplia, chief networks officer at Evie Networks, which runs 350 fast-charging sites Australia-wide, says demand has been climbing sharply so far this year. “We have 450,000 cars on the road today that are battery electric – just over 2 per cent of all vehicles,” he says. “Soon, that’s going to become 20 per cent of vehicles.”

Early signs of this pressure became visible over the Easter long weekend, when thousands of electric vehicle drivers headed onto the highways en masse. Long queues formed at some regional charging stations, with waits stretching into hours at the busiest locations as motorists competed for limited charging bays.

While peak holiday demand periods are an issue that need to be addressed, the wider rollout appears to be progressing well. In fact, the network remains underutilised today, as operators have moved to invest ahead of demand, heading off any immediate concerns about the ability to accommodate this year’s emerging wave of electric cars.

“In the US, the top three public charge point operators have utilisation rates above 20 per cent – ours is more in the low teens,” Conopolia says. “We have headroom on the network, and the competitive market is getting on with the job.”

Still, the industry estimates up to $5 billion of investment in further infrastructure is needed over the next five years, which Conoplia says requires governments to deliver a clearer strategy and policies to better coordinate the rollout and support a necessary uplift in investor confidence. “The challenge is that this needs to continue,” he says.

“We need an order-of-magnitude-greater investment, and we will need all stakeholders – private operators, distribution network service providers, consumer groups and governments – all pulling in the same direction if we are going to achieve the infrastructure we need.”

One of the key obstacles to overcome may not be a lack of investment, but time. Bringing a new charging station online can sometimes take between 18 months to two years, slowed by challenges securing equipment, and often-lengthy processes for power-distribution companies to connect them into the grid. In some cases, new fast-charger connections can require local infrastructure upgrades such as new transformers or additional cables to accommodate them.

“These approvals take a long, long time,” Carloop’s Akhter says. “It has been one of the bigger hurdles to getting charging infrastructure in the ground.”

Earlier this year, more than a dozen organisations involved in the electric vehicle industry, including charge-point operators and energy suppliers, signed a joint statement saying they “stand ready to invest, build and operate” the infrastructure the nation desperately needs, so long as governments set out clear rules compelling network operators to reduce connection timeframes and increase data transparency to assist applicants vying for grid access.

“The single biggest thing governments can do right now is force distribution network service providers to publicly identify where they have network capacity,” says Nexa Advisory’s Stephanie Bashir, a former executive at energy giant AGL. “Having that as publicly available information is critical.”

The organisations also called on governments to rule out allowing network companies, the likes of Ausgrid, CitiPower, Powercor, and Essential Energy, to enter the competitive public-charging market themselves. Authorities have granted temporary waivers of “ring-fencing” rules for some of them allowing them to launch kerbside charging trials, sparking strong opposition from critics across the sector who argue it will erode investor confidence and crowd out much-needed private capital.

In a submission to the regulator this year, network companies insisted they could play a key role in accelerating the public charging rollout at a critical time, helping ensure greater access for those unable to charge at home because they lived in apartments or did not have off-street parking.

“We do not have enough accessible, affordable public charging,” said Energy Networks Australia, an industry group. “By enabling distribution networks to install, own and maintain kerbside electric vehicle charging using existing infrastructure, such as power poles, we can deliver faster, more affordable, and more widespread access to charging where people need it.”

Other experts believe the rollout requires a “central coordinator” to identify and upgrade areas of the electricity grid where congestion is holding up the deployment of new chargers, and to ensure the right kind of public charging infrastructure is being built where people actually need it. “A central body – whether it’s a government agency, an industry committee or a joint authority – needs to identify bottlenecks and pain points,” says Dia.

Getting the balance right may not be easy. Build too slowly, and drivers risk losing confidence in electric vehicles because charging becomes too inconvenient. Build too aggressively, and expensive infrastructure will sit idle. “It’s a global challenge to put the right amount of charging in the right places,” NRMA spokesman Peter Khoury says. “That requires strong coordination – and state governments and grid operators must make this a priority.”

NRMA was one of the first Australian organisations to begin rolling out public charging infrastructure, opening sites in Sydney and Canberra as early as 2012.

It now has a network of 176 charging stations nationwide, yet Khoury doubts Australia will ever reach a point where the job is done. As the electric vehicle fleet grows, charging demand will continue growing with it. Just as new petrol stations continue to be built, he expects the charging network will remain in a constant state of expansion. “Our view is that we’ll always be building more charging,” Khoury says. “You can probably never have enough.”

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