The launch of this adventure – the first full battery electric truck to do a lap of Australia – happened on September 5 at Jon Edwards’ workshop in O’Connor, Western Australia, on a wild late winter day.
The attendance of several politicians was notable and perhaps shows how times have changed, or are changing. Josh Wilson, the federal MLA for Fremantle and newly appointed assistant minister for climate change and energy spoke about the possible energy crisis if petroleum fuel were cut off to Australia, and how important it was to support pioneers like Jon.
Darren West, MLC and parliamentary secretary to WA’s energy minister, arrived in his Tesla – a farmer from the wheat belt driving an EV – and talked about the WA government’s support for the EV transition.
Brad Pettitt, WA Greens MLC has been a supporter since the beginning and arrived on a cargo bike in the rain. The event (and trip) were partly staged to highlight the progress in rolling out the WA EV charging network.
Representatives from WA’s energy utilities were pleased to hear compliments but also accepted that there had been problems, and that off-grid remote charging still presents challenges to all organisations installing them across Australia.
Jon gave a detailed description of the trip and its challenges in the Hyundai Might 7-tonne electric truck. The original plan to carry a Biofil charger running on waste cooking oil was abandoned , so no liquid fuel will be carried and the journey will be powered entirely by the existing charging network.
As of last week, this does happen to include one of Jon’s Biofil units, plus 1000 litres of old cooking oil which Horizon Power has installed in the north at Whim Creek until their off-grid charger is ready.
The truck has a useful battery capacity of 92kWh before entering “turtle”mode and can be charged any time at roadside stops from the 120kWh (100useable) extra battery in the tray via CCS2 port at 42kW.
The tray battery in turn can be charged from either a T2 or 32A 3 phase AC outlet via a Setec rectifier giving a DC charging output of 20kW. This slightly roundabout way of charging was needed because a software glitch caused the tray battery to charge at more than its maximum 40kW when plugged in directly to a high power CCS2 DC charger, risking battery damage.
If things get desperate, Jon also has a setup to allow this battery to be charged from a 15A caravan park outlet. As I write this, the truck is on day two, north of Minilya over 1000km from the start.
Cold weather and rain have pushed average consumption up over 44kW/100km but still allowing over 400 km range on full charge. The truck battery doesnot have active thermal management and heats up during charging.
This may present a problem with higher ambient temperatures as the battery goes into“protection” mode above 55 degrees Celsius. I’ll try to provide an update on the journey, but we will be in transit next week across the Nullarbor (in an EV, of course) to meet up with Jon and the truck in either Sydney or Canberra.
Update: No active battery thermal management system but battery goes into protection mode above 55 degrees. It hit 57 degrees today while charging at Broome with ambient temp of 39 degrees and throttled the charger back to 50kW.
The completely off-grid solar WA EV network charger at Lagrange, just south of Broome worked perfectly but a couple of chargers further south on the network were severely tested by the high draw – 90kW into the truck, plus more into the tray battery.
The WA EV network charger at Pardoo caravan park failed badly, with 5 attempts at charging causing the entire park to black out each time. A whole bunch of grey nomads were not impressed.
Part of the problem in WA might be that the remote chargers are designed to give about two charges of around 30kWh, for around 200 km range for an average EV. The Mighty truck takes up 90kW and the tray battery can take up 100+kW so way above the designed capacity.
Part of the benefit of this trip is to test the capacity of the systems.
The electric truck journey can be tracked here.