The first of 70 new electric vehicle chargers to be rolled out by the ACT government went into operation on Friday as the doors opened on the national EV Summit in Barton.
The 70 fast chargers, to be installed by three successful bidders, are in addition to the 35 existing chargers across Canberra. The new network will be rolled out over the next 18 months.
Evie Networks' chief executive officer Chris Mills said that the company, which is installing 35 of the chargers in collaboration with ActewAGL, had "burned the midnight oil" to get the first one installed in Burbury Close, behind the Hotel Realm, which was hosting the EV Summit.
The locations of the fast chargers across the city had been the result of intensive computer modelling by Evie Networks. All will be the latest Australian-made Tritium chargers, with each one fitted with dual plugs to ensure they fit all vehicles.
To counter criticism of reliability issues across the charger network, Evie will closely monitor their operation remotely from its network operating centre.
"We're very much aware that if a charger develops a fault, we need to get it up and back online as quickly as possible," Mr Mills said.
"We can sometimes address that issue remotely - via a remote reboot, if you like - or we have a subcontractor in Canberra with spare parts, and they can physically head out and fix it."
Software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who was both a speaker and sponsor of the EV Summit, told a discussion forum that "too much time had been wasted" in Australia and that we only had to "look across the Tasman" to the New Zealand experience to see how quickly the shift to electric vehicles can happen.
"People look at the fast take-up of electric vehicles in Sweden and Norway and say 'Oh, that's in Europe, that's different to here [in Australia]," the co-chief executive officer of software giant Atlassian said.
"But New Zealand went from a 3 per cent EV market share to 10 per cent in just one year."
He said that Australia's emissions standards were "way behind the rest of the world" and that Australia "has to make that big leap to catch up otherwise we won't hit the targets we need to by 2030".
Mr Cannon-Brookes described the car industry's voluntary CO2 emission standards as like "marking your own homework".
"Tough compulsory standards will send a very clear message to the [car] industry," he said
While only 2 per cent of Australia's new vehicle market is electric vehicles, the extraordinary public and industry interest generated by EVs was evidenced by the packed Canberra event which featured a billionaire businessman, car company heads, state and federal ministers, and even the new US ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy.
Federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen drove down from Sydney in his bug-smeared white Tesla Model3, plugged into Canberra's newest fast charger at the back of the Hotel Realm in Barton, then told the summit that he doesn't want "[emission] standards that leave us at the back of the queue".
Rarely does Tesla techno billionaire Elon Musk allow his senior executives to speak on the electric vehicle company's behalf. He generally only offers corporate communiques personally, or via the Twitter platform.
However, his Australian chief executive Robyn Denholm, who worked for Toyota when it was a local car maker, was given the rare opportunity at the summit to talk about Tesla and her views on the EV industry generally.
She is hugely supportive of Australia regenerating its car industry, and said that creating local volume battery production was the first step using the key raw materials - lithium, manganese and nickel - mined here.
She told the summit that Tesla bought $1 billion worth of raw materials for its vehicle battery operations last year and 70 per cent of those materials were from Australia. However, all the refinement and production of that material occurred offshore.
"Australia needs the resolve to climb up the food chain on EV manufacturing and that logically should start with battery manufacturing," Ms Denholm said.
"We have the raw materials and the knowhow. We need the will and tenacity to work through what has to be done."
