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After the government scrapped subsidies for electric cars, sales of new electric cars plummeted from 27% of the market to 8%. File photo.
photo: 123 RF
Electric car lobby group Drive Electric said the government had pledged to roll out 10,000 public electric car chargers by 2030 but that construction was currently happening at a fraction of the rate needed.
As of April, New Zealand had 1,200 public electric vehicle chargers, about one for every 59 fully electric vehicles.
Kirsten Corson of Drive Electric said that to meet its promise to build 10,000 chargers by 2030, it would need to build 130 chargers per month, compared with last year’s pace of 21 per month.
“We really need to step up our game,” she said.
Kosen said the removal of government subsidies for electric vehicles had made it harder to attract corporate capital to build chargers, causing sales of new electric vehicles to plummet from 27% last year to 8% so far this year.
This puts New Zealand’s electric vehicle penetration rate far behind China, the European Union and the United States.
But it’s not all bad news.
The government has announced $257 million for more chargers – although Corson said the industry needed more details on how the money would be used.
One of the oft-cited statistics about New Zealand’s lack of charging infrastructure might not be as bad as it seems.
The International Energy Agency Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2024 The country ranks last among 31 countries in terms of the number of public charging stations per electric car.
But in terms of the ratio of fast to slow chargers, New Zealand topped the list, with 75 per cent of chargers fast, well ahead of second-placed South Africa (53 per cent).
“This can be attributed to New Zealand prioritizing fast public chargers over slower chargers,” the agency said. “Although New Zealand has the highest number of vehicles per charger, it is ahead of countries such as Australia and Thailand in terms of charging capacity per electric vehicle.”
Richard Briggs from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) said fast chargers were vital for people travelling long distances, as they could charge more vehicles in the same amount of time than slower chargers. He said many slow chargers were not even counted in New Zealand’s official statistics.
But that doesn’t mean achieving the goal of 10,000 public chargers will be easy.
One challenge, Briggs said, is getting businesses to invest in charging stations before they are utilized at a level that makes them profitable.
He said the slowdown in electric vehicle adoption after the government abandoned clean car rebates bought more time to promote electric vehicles but also made them less attractive for companies to invest.
Briggs said the new government prefers a loan model rather than grants to encourage construction because charging stations will be profitable in the future and companies can repay the funds. Transport Minister Simeon Brown said the government will continue to promote charging stations while redesigning its co-financing model.
Briggs said that aside from the upfront price, the fear of running out of juice is the main factor holding people back from going electric.
However, he said the reality was that once people bought an electric car, 80 per cent of charging was done at home, with the average round trip distance being just 20 kilometres.
He said there was no doubt that electric cars took longer to refuel than gasoline cars.
But he said that with good design, people would rarely need to go to charging stations — at least not those designed in the way of traditional gas stations.
Briggs said EECA is encouraging retailers to set up charging points in convenient locations such as gyms, supermarkets and shopping malls, where people would park their cars for 30 minutes to two hours.
Long-distance trips require high-speed chargers that deliver large amounts of power quickly — which Briggs said are still hard to find in some places.
One of the challenges of building these facilities is that high-capacity transmission lines are often deliberately located away from busy arterial roads, so choosing a location often involves a trade-off between cost and convenience, he said.
Public chargers are a necessity for apartment dwellers and other drivers without off-street parking.
JOLT is one of Australia’s largest urban charging networks and has recently started building chargers in Australia, the UK and Canada, using a model where free charging is funded through display advertising.
Chief executive Doug McNamee said a successful rollout of the scheme would require coordination between central and local government and the line companies.
He said countries around the world were struggling to build enough chargers to meet demand for electric vehicles, and the UK was one of the most successful because of its unified approach.
The transport minister said as well as providing funding the government was also addressing resource consent requirements for electric vehicle chargers.
He said 225 new car charging points had been added since the Coalition was elected, with rapid charging facilities for a further 173 cars announced in April.
EV Stats:
*EECA updates the number of EV chargers nationwide on a quarterly basis.
- Public chargers are mainly installed in areas with larger populations and higher EV ownership, such as Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
- As of April, there are 1,248 chargers on the island, including 826 in the North Island and 422 in the South Island.
- The Canterbury region has one more charger than Auckland: 296 compared to Auckland’s 295.
- Of the 80 charging stations that will be online by the end of April 2024, 62 were built by ChargeNET.
- An additional 210 nuclear power plants, co-financed by the government through the EECA but not yet built, are expected to come online in 2024 (149) and 2025 (61).
- Just 1.45% of cars nationwide are electric – including 75,000 fully electric plug-in cars and about 30,000 plug-in hybrids (which also have a petrol engine).
- According to the International Energy Agency, nearly one in five cars sold in 2023 will be electric, a year-on-year increase of 35%.
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