This report outlines the recent challenges from the UltraFast EV Charger rollout, in addition to earlier lessons learnt from this project. Key learnings include driver demand, state comparison, connection issues, and tariff discrepancies based on demand or capacity charges.
Report extract
Since the last report, the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) has continued to grow at a rapid pace. The volume of EVs sold has increased to 5000 vehicles per month, up from 900 at the time of the last report. The proportion of new car sales is now consistently over 5%, considered by many to be a tipping point for mass market adoption. Alongside this increase in demand the public profile of EV charging has also expanded, with recent media coverage on various topics such as peak day queuing, charging point reliability, issues with EV owners blocking charging points (also known as “ICEing”), and equity in access to charging points.
Despite the progress made in the EV industry, barriers to deployment of public fast charging infrastructure remain the same as they were when this program commenced, with the key dependencies continuing to be site host agreements and power connections. We demonstrate the power connection barrier in this report, with some connections taking nearly 3 years from initial application to energisation. There are a number of reasons behind these delays and not all are due to distribution network processes, but it is clear that there is significant improvement required if infrastructure is to be deployed in an efficient manner.