From left to right roundtable participants NZ Police’s Leighton Hamlin and Brian Yanko as well as OCS’s Gareth Marriot. Photo: Hidden Joys Studio
Mass adoption won’t happen without strong charging infrastructure, experts warn.
In April, the Luxon government announced a plan to accelerate the delivery of electric vehicle (EV) chargers across the nation through a co-investment with the private sector.
For all the talk about increasing EV ownership across New Zealand, the
country still only had about 1400 charge points – around one for every 84 EVs at the end of last year.
To put things more starkly, New Zealand has fewer public chargers per EV than many other countries in the OECD.
“We know that this is a barrier to Kiwis purchasing EVs,” Transport Minister Chris Bishop said at the time.
“People buying an EV need confidence that they can charge where and when they need to on a comprehensive public network,” Bishop said.
“The Government is moving to a more sophisticated, commercial procurement model.
“We have set aside up to $68.5 million in currently held grant funding, to provide concessionary loans to private operators to co-invest in public EV charging infrastructure. Loans will be quicker to implement and will help achieve the Government’s objectives with less complexity, cost and risk,” Bishop said.
The Government is targeting 10,000 by 2030, so that there will be one public charge point to around 40 EVs. It believes this will remove people’s “range anxiety” and make owning an EV as easy as possible.
According to Bishop, the Government will utilise the highly successful Ultra-Fast Broadband model to accelerate the roll-out of EV chargers because under the status quo, the private sector have been reluctant to invest in charging infrastructure until there’s sufficient demand.
“This demand for charging won’t grow until the purchase of EVs stops being hampered by a lack of public charging. This chicken-and-egg situation is hampering the roll-out and justifies government action,” Bishop said.
Participants at the recent New Age of Mobility roundtable co-hosted by the New Zealand Herald and Custom Fleet agreed the lack of infrastructure is hampering the growth of the EV sector at present.
According to the President of Custom Fleet, Chris Tulloch, there’s not only a lack of infrastructure but “a lack of reliability even if the infrastructure is there”.
“There’s just a general lack of innovation when it comes to how we could potentially roll out infrastructure to support more mass adoption of electric vehicles,” Tulloch says.
“It’s a bit of a stalemate at the moment waiting for who’s going to move first – the government or the private sector. The best examples around the world of a thriving EV sector is where the investment in the sector is infrastructure led.”
Fellow roundtable participant, Managing Director of facilities management leaders OCS, Gareth Marriott agreed an infrastructure first approach seems to have led to a more successful take-up of EVs.
“Scandinavia shows what happens when you invest in infrastructure first – it gives people the confidence to switch. In New Zealand, we’ll need the same approach if we want business and households to commit to EVs at scale,” Marriott says.
Tulloch also cites cities such as London where there are currently upwards of 24,000 chargers across the city.
London leads the UK in electric vehicle uptake, with 193,000 plug-in electric cars and vans registered in the capital with the UK Department for Transport predicting there
will be 1.4 million by 2030. This reflects the UK Government’s Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which requires all new cars and vans to be zero emission by 2035.
Beyond the infrastructure challenge, roundtable participants spoke of the cost of EVs and their potential resale value as also hindering their rollout.
The issue of resale or residual value of EVs was raised by most participants with a recent survey undertaken by US-based data-driven car search and research company iSeeCars.com finding the values of EVs crash after purchase falling 58.8 per cent in 5 years.
Head of Operations support at Watercare, Mathew Telfer, says the utility looks at whole of life cost when it looks at fleet costs so they prefer to watch how the EV sector continues to evolve at present.
Telfer says as a local government organisation Watercare has to look very closely at costs and while the organisation likes to innovate it prefers to be a fast follower once there is proof of concept.
He says unknowns such as the rolling out of charging infrastructure and the potential introduction of road user charges for EVs are issues that can change Watercare’s current cost assessments.
“So, change within the environment which leads to change of cost to us creates a certain wariness as we have to pass on those costs to our customers,” Telfer says.
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