The Tritium legacy: Councils give up on broken EV chargers, and one gets wiped out by a tree

The Gold Coast City Council, host to one of the highest uptakes of electric vehicles outside of the national capital, has ripped out the bulk of its EV charging stations are giving up on trying keep the Tritium-made equipment on line.

Tritium, the Brisbane based company that dominated the initial rollout of EV fast chargers in Australia, and took a major chunk of the global market, collapsed two years ago before being bought out by an Indian company.

Tritium may have been a pace-setter but its first generation equipment proved to be unreliable, and many charging hosts complained of the difficulty in securing spare parts and repairs. The Gold Coast is not the only one to scrap its Tritium fleet, although it likely had one of the biggest EV charging fleets of any council.

Motoring clubs are also frustrated. Last year, the RACV replaced 22 of its Tritium chargers, and NRMA has done the same in NSW, and in the red centre, where a Tritium charger failed in an off-grid set up. In Queensland, a number of Tritium chargers along that state’s “super highway” have already been, or are about to be replaced.

In  Western Australia, the RAC has simply walked away from supporting the network it helped create over the past decade, and some of the council hosts have already decided to follow the example of the Gold Coast and others and dismantle their chargers.

Mandurah is to rip out its unreliable Tritium charger and it will be decommissioned on Friday, July 25. Another Tritium charger at Augusta is not working. At Bridgetown, the Tritium charger has also been ripped out by the local council, and it is rumoured it will be replaced by a 350 kW charger, complete with solar and batteries.

And just to add to the frustration of local EV drivers, this week, a tree fell on top of the Tritium charger at Balingup (see photo at top), just as one EV user had predicted it would be in demand because of the Bridgetown closure.

Back at the Gold Coast City Council, a spokesman said it had “made the difficult decision” to decommission its 10 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in June, due to the challenges with sourcing parts and reliable servicing options.

“Unfortunately, due to these challenges, the EV chargers’ performance declined where they were no longer reliable and the stations availability was not at the high standard we would expect for customers,” the spokesperson said.

The decommissioning occurred in June, to the dismay of some in the industry who thought that they should have been immediately swapped over with new equipment, rather than removed and having the charging bays painted over.

“The bays have been painted back to regular bays and it doesn’t look like a replacement is planned,” Christian Hewitt, the former head of sales at Tritium and now chief sales officer at EV-NRG, wrote on LinkedIn.

“There’s already exceptionally limited infrastructure on the Gold Coast and this network has been the backbone of EV growth and travel in the city. It’s disappointing but dare I say, not surprising.”

“During my time at Tritium I spent years working with council to get this deal together in what was an Australian first at the time.
Whilst I can appreciate not wasting money fixing a product that should’ve been recalled, my numerous attempts for GCCC to speak to industry about alternative solutions(including just leasing the bays) all went unanswered.”

The good news is that the city says it is looking to the future, and this week an Electric Vehicle Charging Management Plan was presented to the City’s Transport and Infrastructure committee, proposing a new framework for future deployment of EV charging stations.

The bad news is that we don’t yet know what is in it. The report – which presented options for the City’s future involvement in the previous of EV charging stations – was presented to a closed session of council, and while approved it has not been published.

The reason given for the secrecy is that negotiations are still continuing with a commercial supplier “for which a public discussion would be likely to prejudice the interests of the local government,” according to the council agenda and minutes.