EV charging station at QUT with out of order sign. Pic: Giles Parkinson.
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 million 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.”
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.
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.”
Rachel Williamson is a science and business journalist, who focuses on climate change-related health and environmental issues.
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How much of this is due to the chargers being Tritium units for which parts are no longer available?
Yes, some are indeed Tritium chargers (Yarra Glen, Alexandra and Mansfield for example All been out of order for weeks). I don't know about lack of parts. The Tritium charger at Port Fairy was out of order over the Labour Day long weekend in March but is now back going again.
NRMA and EVIE seem to charge the most to use their chargers and they use a lot of Tritium chargers. If the wiring is already there where the faulty chargers are why not swap it over with a different brand such as Kempower.
NRMA is a big proponent of EVs according to their public stance but they are dragging the chain with their outdated, slow and problem-prone charging network. They are undermining their own stated policy.
I concur with AEVA that chargers financed or supported by government funds (state, local or federal) need to have enforceable penalties and minimum charge rate standards that ratchet up to keep up with demand.
Tesla has been able to deliver a reliable and updated chargers in Australia for a decade so it is possible.
The single NRMA Gunnedah charger has only just come online again after 5 months of being broken. Completely unsatisfactory as the next nearest fast chargers are mostly around 100km or more distant- Scone, Coonabarabran, Narrabri and Tamworth (closest at 78km)
Yes!
And the rubbish yurika ones in Queensland!
Why worry most people charge at home from solar apparently
Which is true, but Aussies just have to keep doing road trips, no matter how unsustainable that behaviour is, so fast charging on highways is always going to be important.
I know this charger in QUT city campus, it's now be replaced with Autel DC fast charger and now seems no downtime issue any more...
“charge point operators must start using real time data to look after existing charger assets”
And why would anyone think they are not doing that already?
Tritium sucked at telemetry, had no parts management plan, and focused on chasing grants rather than profitability. They had amazing patents, but no manufacturing or sustainment nous. How do I know - I had friends on the inside.
“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”
It seems Clara Owen is unaware that Plugshare mostly comprises crowd-sourced data, and many of the “coming soon” sites have been added by end users.
That’s why, rightly or wrongly, those sites are listed.
It comes from people looking at the results of government grant applications, Council DAs, or even spotting construction activity on-site. They then add the site themselves to Plugshare.
While it’s well intentioned, Plugshare does have a guideline that sites should not be added as “coming soon” unless there is visible construction activity and the site is expected to be operational within a month. Many users completely ignore that.
It is normally not the CPOs that are adding the “coming soon” sites.
And there is a filter to hide the coming soon sites.
“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. Ms Owen is right to be worried, but her maths is lousy. 7000 x 100,000 is millions not hundreds of thousands.
$700,000,000 to be exact, only out by a factor of 1000...
Correct. Did she mean 100 chargers, rather than 100,000? After all, the total installed is 15,290 connectors, so nobody has anywhere near 100,000.
It's a subject which deserves far more attention, but first we have to reach some consensus on definitions. When referring to uptime (or downtime) do we mean for each individual connector, or for the site as a whole? If one connector out of six is out-of-service It is not too serious, but if the whole site is out-of-service that is very serious. Next, what is a reasonable uptime in a service agreement? If we are talking about site uptime, 98% is not nearly good enough. 2% downtime is just over 7 days per year which is not acceptable for a site, but may be acceptable for an individual connector. Having one or two connectors out-of-service may lead to queues forming and delays, but at least everyone should be able to charge. The uptime for sites needs to be more like 99.9%, which is about 9 hours per year downtime. The thing which bedevils so many Australian charging sites is that they have too few connectors. The article quotes 15,290 connectors over 5794 sites, which is an average of 2.6 connectors per site. This is a pathetically small number, especially if some of those connectors are CHAdeMO (sorry LEAF owners, but you have the Betamax of EV chargers). It seems only Tesla does the job properly with 6 to 12 connectors per site.
Lastly, I don't think that imposing financial penalties is the right approach to improving reliability. The business is hardly lucrative. Imagine a 50kW charger with average occupancy of 25% (6 hours per day). The provider can charge customers about 40 cents/kWh. Let's assume that the provider is paying the energy supplier 20 c/kWh leaving a gross margin of 20 c/kWh. If the charger is running at its full capacity whenever a car is connected it earns about $22,000 per year gross, but this is very sensitive to the actual price of electricity. (If anyone has some actual numbers I'm happy to be corrected.) The greatest reliability improvement would come from having more connectors per site. As long as the chargers operate independently of each other, having several at each site reduces downtime dramatically. 98% uptime (2% downtime) for one charger becomes 99.96% uptime for two chargers. Actual experience is not as good as this because some faults affect all chargers at a site, not just one, but the principle of achieving reliability through redundancy still holds.
Replacing all Chademo plugs for CCS would be a good start.