A complete network of electric car charging stations will cover Australia within five years, the man behind a globally recognised electric charger design believes.
David Finn, the co-founder and chief executive of the Brisbane-based Tritium electric car charger company, also predicted a major change in how drivers would charge their vehicles.
“You won’t necessarily charge their electric car at home anymore,” Mr Finn said.
“You might pull up once a week or once every two weeks – with these larger battery packs – and in the time it takes to go get a cup of coffee you have charged up your car.”
“You might see them in front of a Coles or a Woolworths because it makes more sense. As you pop in to the do your groceries once a week, you charge up your car.
“This will be a bit of a game changer as the technology adoption is going.”
In Australia, the majority of electric car charging is done overnight in homes but over the past 18 months a network of very fast electric car chargers – including Titium’s 350-kilowatt DC model – are becoming more prominent as electric charging networks expand along the coastline.
Queensland alone will have at least 13 extra 50-kilowatt charge sites in the next 12 months.
Former US deputy president and climate change activist Al Gore last month pinpointed Tritium’s work with electric vehicles as an example of a sunrise industry, just starting to reveal its potential.
In the 20 years since it began at the University of Queensland, Tritium built an international profile exporting super-fast electric chargers in 2018. It now has has 300 electric charging stations in 75 locations throughout Europe and now looking at opportunities in China and India.
How fast are electric car chargers
Superfast electric car chargers (350 kilowatts) can give 400 kilometres of charge in 15 minutes
That’s roughly 200 kilometres of range in eight minutes
Fifty-kilowatt chargers can deliver 60 kilometres of range in 15 minutes
Home-based AC to DC converter chargers can take between six and eight hours
Straight from the socket that’s closer to eight hours but on the way down
By mid-2018 the company was building 1800 electric chargers – of varying scales – each year from its Murarrie factory.
When asked if a network of fast-charging, electric car chargers would connect the whole country within five years, Mr Finn definitive.
“Shorter, shorter,” he said.
“The idea of these networks is to give full national coverage, to be able to drive from Brisbane to Adelaide, for example.”
Mr Finn predicts Brisbane has the potential – as Australia’s largest local government – to mirror what the City of Hamburg has done and provide an electric car network.
“The City of Hambug has its own municipality-owned utility,” he said.
“I think there is a great opportunity for Brisbane to do something interesting here because it is such a large geographic area.”
“It could provide a network of some substance and I think the time is pretty much right now.”
Mr Finn said two new competing electric charger networks had national coverage aspirations, with funding assistance from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
Chargefox, which launched in 2018, plans to have 22 charging stations on the east coast of Australia including Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.
EV Networks plans a network of chargers in 43 sites including Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, and will also include stations near Perth.
Mr Finn predicted petrol vehicles would reach maximum production globally in five years before decreasing as companies shifted toward electric vehicles.
“They will only decline after that as EV comes in,” he said.
“All the forecasts are saying that; that is peak (petrol) cars in five years.”
New electric Nissans gave drivers a 300-kilometre range, while the new Hyundai Kona allowed a motorist to drive 450 kilometres on one charge.
Queensland announced a network of electric car chargers from Cairns to Coolangatta in January 2018, and other Australian eastern states moved around the same time.
A new Queensland government company called Yurika, part of Energy Queensland, now runs the state’s network of 17 stations with Chargefox.
Yurika is now considering how much it will bill electric car drivers to charge their vehicles after an 18-month free trial.
“While there may be a fee charged in the future for using Queensland Electric Super Highway charging stations, currently there are no fees,” a Yurika spokesman said.
State Transport Minister Mark Bailey confirmed 13 extra sites were being added to 18 existing sites on the coastal “Queensland Electric Super Highway”.
“The majority of host sites for the new charging stations have been identified and negotiations with property owners are underway,” Mr Bailey said.
“The new sites will be located on or just inland from the coast to ensure there are more charging points along the QESH, and in places where they are likely to attract higher rates of use.”
“The chargers will be 50-kilowatt DC and a dual 22-kilowatt AC charger, the same as those used on the chargers installed in the initial rollout.”
David Finn is one of the keynote speakers at the Asia Pacific Cities Summit being held in Brisbane this week, attracting 1270 delegates from 140 cities including 83 mayors.
Others include Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, Amazon’s former chief scientist Andreas Weigend and the chairperson of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, Dr Peggy Liu.
Extracted from The Sydney Morning Herald