Australia’s first 50 kW DC fast charger retires after more than a decade of use

Australia’s first ever 50 kilowatt (kW) DC fast charger has been replaced, after more than a decade of service in an inner-Melbourne suburb. 

The then-Moreland Council in Melbourne’s inner north installed the 50 kW Tritium charger in 2013, thanks to electric vehicle advocate (and former car manufacturing worker) Stuart Nesbitt.

The installation was at the now-Merri-Bek council chambers in Coburg, and was included in the Chargefox network in 2019. 

Following Tritium’s collapse earlier this year, that charger has now been replaced with a Sinexcel 60 kW DC, after reaching the end of its life. It outlasted many of the later versions of the company’s 50 kW chargers, which had notorious problems on reliability.

The new charger has been installed by Eon and has been relocated across the road to the Coburg Leisure Centre. It will also be on the Chargefox network.

Merri-Bek has traditionally been one of the most supportive councils in Australia for EV charging, with 23 council-managed charging bays that are a mix of slow and fast chargers. 

The Tritium charger was free for a long time, and was regularly used. The council introduced a 20c/kWh fee for slow chargers and 40 c/kWh fee for fast chargers in July to help fund more installations, maintenance, and to prevent over-stays. 

The council says it’s started talks with private charging operators to increase the number of bays available in Merri-bek to cater for forecast demand — which has been strong for years and is rising fast, if the increasing numbers of Teslas and BYD models trawling Sydney Road are an indication. 

The Merri-bek Council’s Chargefox chargers are some of the most popular nationally of the network’s 1000-odd locations, says Chargefox head of marketing Rob Asselman.

He says internal data shows that since since early 2021, Charger #4082 at the Civic Centre was used almost 10,000 times.

A LinkedIn post elicited a number of responses, including one who noted that the first DC fast  charger was installed in 2011, although it was a lower speed old kW Fuji.

The new CEO of Tritium, Arcady Sosinov, also responded:

“That’s the end of the chapter, but certainly not the end of the story. Tritium deserves a lot of credit for deploying the first fast charger in Australia 11 years ago, but there’s no use in looking back anymore,” he wrote.

We’re Charging Forward and writing a new chapter, and that chapter will have Tritium deploying fast and ultrafast charging infrastructure all over Australia and all over the world.”