A recent trip to visit a family member across town in Brunswick became a frustrating expedition for electric vehicle owner Ajo Pathmanathan as he tried to find a working rapid charging station for his car.
“I went and picked up my niece and nephew and my plan was to go have lunch and charge the car at a little hub just off Sydney Road where there are two rapid chargers,” he said of his quest to find a public charger in working order in Melbourne’s north.
Ajo Pathmanathan at an out-of-order EV charging station in Altona. Credit:Chris Hopkins
“But when I went they were out of order,” Pathmanathan said. “So then we went up to the council hub and that was out too. Then I went up further up near the Western Ring Road and that was out as well, and I’m like ‘Man, this is weird!’”
Luckily, he had enough juice in his Tesla to make the trip back home to Williams Landing, in Melbourne’s west, but his afternoon of frustration is common for many owners of electric vehicles.
While some of the sites Pathmanathan visited have since been repaired, at least three are still out of order awaiting parts. His local charging port in Altona has also been out of order for about two months.
“What’s frustrating from an owner’s perspective is the charger rollout doesn’t feel like it’s keeping up with demand,” he said. “Every weekend a lot of the chargers out and about are constantly in use.”
Supply chain issues related to COVID-19 are being blamed for a blowout in the number of out-of-order public chargers, just as increasing numbers of drivers are making the transition to electric vehicles.
The most recent available data shows there were 10,311 EVs registered in Victoria as of June 2021, up from 6749 the previous year. While drivers mostly recharge their vehicles at home, public charging stations are much faster and are often necessary for people making longer trips, or for those, such as apartment dwellers, who might not be able to charge their car at home.
There are about 490 postcodes in Victoria without a charging point, according to data listed in January by crowd-sourced app Plugshare.com.
It is difficult to gauge how many of the 967 chargers in Victoria listed on Plugshare – which maps EV charging station locations – are out of order at any one time.
One of the largest EV charging network providers, ChargeFox, had at least 21 plugs out of order across 15 sites in its wider network (made up of more than 70 sites and 235 plugs) across Victoria this week.
The issue has been more pronounced in flood-affected areas of NSW and Queensland, where chargers were inundated.
While ChargeFox is not responsible for maintenance in its network, it is responsible for alerting those who own the stations – usually councils or shopping centre owners – to any malfunctions. It blamed the lag in repairing them on supply chain delays for parts, rather than the reliability of the chargers.
“We operate a couple of thousand plugs across the country,” ChargeFox CEO Marty Andrews said. “So 1 or 2 per cent of that is 20 to 40 plugs. It’s not unusual for 1 or 2 per cent to have problems at any given time.
Ajo Pathmanathan at an out-of-order EV charging station.Credit:Chris Hopkins
“Normally those problems would get fixed reasonably quickly, and people wouldn’t notice them, and they’d move on… But I think in particular, people are noticing because there are some chargers that need parts and those parts are taking a long time to arrive because of supply chain issues.”
Evie Networks, which owns and maintains chargers, said its delays in repairs were dictated by how long it took to get parts from Australian charging station manufacturer Tritium.
Tritium recently became a publicly listed company on the US Stock Exchange and announced, alongside US President Joe Biden, a new production plant in Tennessee.
“Right now we suffer from the surge in demand of charging equipment worldwide,” said Evie CEO Chris Mills, who estimated it could take up to eight weeks for a microchip to arrive.
One of the strategies Evie is using to make repairs quickly was pulling apart some of the chargers they had bought for the spare parts inside.
Tritium did not respond to questions about its supply chain issues.
Behyad Jafari, CEO of the Electric Vehicle Council, said the industry was working hard to fix out-of-order public chargers but echoed the call for more charging stations to be rolled out.
“We need either more electric vehicles on the roads, or at least certainty that there are going to be a lot more electric vehicles on our roads soon, so companies can make the business case to invest in building a lot more of chargers,” he said.
“So that just like with a petrol station if there’s an issue at one place, you can just drive down to the next one.”
A spokeswoman for the Victorian government said it had already supported 25 electric vehicle charges, and a further 141 chargers at 116 sites would be installed by July 2023.
With Nigel Gladstone
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