EV lobby demands financial penalties as broken public chargers fail drivers

Up to 13 per cent of registered public electric vehicle (EV) chargers in Australia are currently unavailable, a number that has the frustrated driver lobby demanding financial penalties are imposed to spur action. 

The data, pulled from charger map Plugshare, reveals the scale of the maintenance problems affecting Australian EV drivers, says Arcadis national asset management lead Clara Owen.

Owen found that Australia has 5794 registered public charger sites with 15,290 connectors – the cable that charges an EV.

Of these, 9 per cent were under repair and 4 per cent were listed as coming soon, a detail which led Owen to question why they are listed. 

“There’s still a lot of reactive maintenance and a lot of scheduled maintenance. In a world with all the data we can collect now… we should be maximising the use of IOT [internet of things],” she told The Driven.

Owen says in an era of constrained budgets and a wealth of data connectivity, charge point operators and local governments must start using real time data to look after existing charger assets, saving money and building confidence in public infrastructure. 

“When you consider it costs $300,000 or so to install, and I estimate around $7,000 per annum to maintain in scheduled or reactive maintenance, if you’ve got 100,000 chargers that’s $700,000  per year in maintenance and costs,” she says. 

“When it’s been proven [that using] predictive maintenance you can get 40 per cent savings.”

But in a country as large as Australia, where environments are harsh, and termites and other electrically-unfriendly insects are vicious, emergency callouts and maintenance run by schedule rather than proactive checks based on data doesn’t cut it. 

“We need predictive maintenance, we need real time monitoring and networks that perform like critical infrastructure,” Owen says, tech that reduces charger downtime by 25-30 per cent.

“If I turned up at a petrol station and they said ‘sorry we’re out of petrol’, you can imagine the furor. Chargers should be the same.”

AEVA demand financial pain for broken chargers

Broken or unavailable chargers are a problem that has the EV drivers’ lobby demanding financial retribution.

“There absolutely needs to be some kind of financial penalty for neglecting service licence agreements,” says Australian Electric Vehicle Association (AEVA) president Chris Jones.

“The thing that’s grinding our gears is the fact that charge point operators are often in receipt of public funds to expand their footprint, but they never seem to prioritise the maintenance of their hardware. 

“Even the WA EV Network, which has service level agreements, is still seeing chargers out of action for months. So the service licence agreements are clearly not being enforced.”

Owen agrees.

“[Uptime] has to be national and it has to be legislated rather than recommended, and there has to be accountability if you don’t comply,” she says.

There are myriad reasons why chargers might be out of order: the billing platform has connectivity issues, the hardware had a transient fault that requires a full reset, or just run-of-the-mill vandalism. 

But Jones’ view is that charge point operators would rather spend their savings on securing the next charger rather than fixing the ones they’ve got.

He floated an “ambitious” way to ensure charger uptime: to turn them into a regulated, essential service with financial and reputational consequences for downtime.

“I don’t think it’s necessary for the networks to own the chargers for them to be regulated, but there really needs to be a bit of stick to balance the carrot,” he says.

Governments need to be more involved

While countries such as the UK have mandated minimum uptime, the term used for charger reliability, Australia is relying on a minimum operating standard released for industry consultation in 2023. 

The requirement asks that all government-funded chargers should have a 98 per cent uptime, 

The National Electric Vehicle Update 2023-24 said industry feedback was sought early last year and changes may be made during a comprehensive review in 2025.

New South Wales (NSW) also requires 98 per cent from all of its state grant-funded chargers. 

The problem is no one seems to be following up on whether chargers are meeting those minimums, nor putting enough capital towards maintenance, and charge point operators are seeing the aftermath of bad practices in their industry.

In a 2024 submission on the National Electric Vehicle Strategy, Jet Charge said governments either needed to ask for uptime guarantees as a condition of any public grants or incentives, or tenders had to include 

The other is to require that “dedicated and committed maintenance funding” is included in any tender for government-funded public EV charging projects.

But as Owen and Jones pointed out, that means nothing if no one is following up on whether chargers are working or not. 

A new Electric Vehicle Council EV guide for local governments said reliability is important to inspire confidence so charge point operators “should provide assurances” about expected uptime and how maintenance will happen, but stopped short of recommending maintenance or uptime guarantees.  

On uptime data, all it said was that “if the local government is interested” then a charge point operator should report back on uptime and utilisation, which might be useful for future rollouts. 

Asset management is not exactly a forte of local governments, many of which are clearly relying on contracted charge operators to do their job without supervision.

A third of councils don’t have an asset management plan for any major assets, according to a report last year by the Australian Local Government Association. 

Of those which do, a third didn’t include any spending forecasts in their plan. 

It’s this lack of care for critical assets that makes Owen angry, both as a professional working in asset management and as an EV driver.

“The plan can’t just look at charging infrastructure, but the whole picture,” she says. 

“It needs integrated planning because you need to also consider things like grid impact and contingency planning. It needs that whole strategy to be put in place. Performance guidelines are important. You are getting this in dribs and drabs, like the communication protocols coming in, but they need to be coordinated to a one stop shop.

“Every failed charge to me is a headline and every headline is a delayed adoption.”