© Reuters. Motor Trade Association NSW Director of Continuous Development Anthony Tomasetti looks at an electric vehicle model used at Advanced Skills Mechanics in Sydney, Australia, May 1, 2023. REUTERS/Jill Gralow
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Written by Louis Jackson
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australians are buying electric cars in droves and the government is trying to speed up adoption of cleaner cars, but industry managers say installing chargers fast enough to meet the boom won’t be easy.
Environmentally conscious Australians and electric vehicle enthusiasts got a boost last month when the government announced plans to set vehicle emissions standards in the last developed country Russia would ban without, to help fix an EV shortage.
But public charging infrastructure remains sparse and not supported by global standards, according to IEA data, a potential deterrent to large-scale EV takeover in a vast country where chargers are still scarce outside cities.
Australia has less than a third more public chargers per electric vehicle on the road than the global average, despite being home to one of the world’s most successful charger manufacturers, Tritium DCFC.
Industry executives said challenges in obtaining equipment, delays in getting public chargers to the grid, and a fragile economy meant mass assembly could not be done overnight.
“It all takes time, so you won’t see chargers popping up everywhere over the next year,” said Carly Irving Dolan, CEO of NRMA Energy and Infrastructure.
NRMA, a motoring services organisation, is partnering with the government to build 135 charging sites across the national motorway network over the next two to three years, in addition to the 2,392 currently available across Australia.
After a decade under a Conservative government that opposed the adoption of electric cars, the country’s Labor government, which won power a year ago, launched a national strategy for electric vehicles and doubled its funding for cleaner transport to A$500 million ($339 million).
Electric vehicle sales are already heading higher, accounting for 8% of all vehicle sales in April, up from 1.1% a year earlier.
Request uncertainty
Despite the government’s push for electric vehicles, there remains uncertainty about how strict vehicle emissions standards will be.
Geoff Brady, chief operating officer of electric charger operator Evie Networks, said the risk was that weak standards were leaving Australia a dumping ground for dirty cars, limiting the supply of new electric vehicles and undermining the economics of charging operators.
“We’re building the infrastructure ahead of demand to support transition. If cars aren’t on the road, that’s a risk to our economies,” Brady said.
If the new standards incentivize automakers to import enough clean cars, Australians will finally see a wide range of electric vehicles on the market as nearly half of all electric vehicles sold in 2022 are built by Tesla (NASDAQ:).
To help overcome the cloudy economy for charger installations, federal and state governments are helping fund rollouts, including support for NRMA and Evie networks.
delivery
Australia’s abundant sunlight and the world’s highest per capita consumption of rooftop solar means that home charging isn’t much of a problem. The challenge is to expand public chargers, especially in regional areas, where the power infrastructure to support fast chargers is often scarce or absent.
Public chargers in the country tend to be underpowered, with 0.5 kilowatts of public charging per EV versus the worldwide average’s 2.4 kilowatts.
Expansion of public chargers is slow as operators face long delays in connecting to the network. An Effie report submitted to the government finance officer in October said the grid connection process was “expensive and inefficient”.
BP (NYSE:) aims to have 300 chargers available through petrol stations in Australia by the end of 2024. The rollout began last November but has been scaled back, in part due to network connectivity issues, said Andrew Worboys, BP’s director of electric vehicle operations. Pulse.
He said installing multiple chargers or high-power units could add up to 12 months to a project, and massive global demand means lead times of up to 18 months for the ultra-fast chargers ordered today. Irving Dolan said the NRMA has waiting times of four to six months.
“One of the biggest issues the average person who buys an electric car and expects to see a fast charger everywhere doesn’t understand,” Worboys said.
Many studies need to be done to ensure that chargers, which often use as much energy as many homes or businesses, don’t dim the lights for existing customers, said Rob Amphlett-Lewis, chief customer officer at Ausgrid. , the most populous state in Australia.
“It’s like the introduction of mass air conditioning in the 1990s and early 2000s, it’s going to require significant investment,” Lewis said.
($1 = 1.4743 Australian dollars)
