A bus depot in Logan, Brisbane, has flicked the switch on the largest electric bus charging site to date in Australia, using chargers from Brisbane-based EV charging solution provider Tritium.
The commissioning follows hot on the heels of the opening of another public bus charging site by Zenobe and Transgrid at Transit System’s Leichhardt depot in Sydney, which will be fitted with 36 chargers in total to eventually power 40 electric buses.
But unlike the Leichardt site, which uses Taiwanese chargers installed by UK-owned company Zenobe, the Logan site is an all Australian story. All those involved – Tritium, JET Charge, Clarks Logan and Bustech – are independent and locally owned companies.
A total of 10 RTM75 scalable 75kW chargers made and designed by Tritium and installed by Melbourne’s Jetcharge will be used by Clarks Logan to power 10 electric buses being made by Brisbane’s Bustech, which will be delivered to the family-owned business over the next few months.
The opening of the chargers was attended by Queensland minister for energy Mick de Brenni and minister for the environment, the Great Barrier Reef and science Meaghan Scanlon, who lost no time pointing out in a LinkedIn post that, “contrary to (prime minister) Scott Morrison’s belief, electric vehicles won’t ‘end the weekend’.”
Alongside the Tritium chargers at Logan is another Australian-designed and developed product – an energy management system made by JET Charge. Unlike pure cloud-based services, it allows for local control of the site which is useful if networks fail.
JET Charge CEO Tim Washington also celebrated the opening in a post on LinkedIn, thanking the enormous effort put in by his staff towards the install but also pointing out that, “The crazy thing is: we’ll need to do this on a larger scale for every single bus depot in the country in the next decade. WOW.”
NSW alone has a plan to replace all 8,000 of its buses by 2030. Victoria has pledged to switch its bus fleet to all-electric (but without a target for when this should be done by), and Queensland wants every new urban bus to be electric by 2025, phasing out new diesel bus purchases.
Speaking to The Driven, Washington expressed a concern that Australia is not ready for such a mammoth task.
“The thing that’s really interesting is that we’ve got two bus depots (Leichhardt and Logan) but we’re going to do this for every single depot this decade,” he says. “That’s hundreds and hundreds of depots around the country.”
“These are great opportunities for companies and consumers but who is going to go out there and do it? Do we actually physically have enough electrical engineers in Australia to power the transition?” he says.
In the wake of the recent NSW announcement that it would spend $171 million on charging infrastructure JET Charge committed to dramatically increase its operations.
Washington notes that even with the small percentage of EV sales currently in Australia (which sits well below 2% when Tesla is not ramping up end-of-quarter deliveries) there is more than enough business to sustain the 82 staff at the Melbourne-based company.
“We’re scaling pretty fast, but we can’t do it alone,” he says.
Bridie Schmidt is associate editor for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She has been writing about electric vehicles since 2018, and has a keen interest in the role that zero-emissions transport has to play in sustainability. She has participated in podcasts such as Download This Show with Marc Fennell and Shirtloads of Science with Karl Kruszelnicki and is co-organiser of the Northern Rivers Electric Vehicle Forum. Bridie also owns a Tesla Model Y and has it available for hire on evee.com.au.