When you add two public holidays either side of the weekend and give the kids a two week break from school, families will disappear from the cities and explore the beaches and regional areas across Australia. This seasonal mass migration is placing new challenges on the growing network of destination electric vehicle chargers as more people choose zero emission motoring.
Before Easter, Evie Networks announced the opening of their 111th EV charging location, on Docker Street, in the heart of Wangaratta’s CBD which on the main arterial route between Sydney and Melbourne.
We caught up with Bernhard Conoplia, Head of Charging at Evie Networks, after the Easter break to find out what happened in their network over this busy period.
“We definitely had record usage on the network over Easter,” explains Conoplia.
“What’s really interesting about the holiday periods is that we see, two to four times utilisation on a number of chargers, and especially on the regional chargers, the utilisation on the metropolitan network is more steady. But it is those regional chargers where we see the large increases of utilisation over that period. We had record days over that period.”
The good news for prospective fleet and novated lease EV buyers that plan to take long trips during peaks periods, there were no headlines in the mainstream media about queues or long wait times. And according to Conoplia, the average charge time was less than half an hour.
“For our network, what we see is a dwell time of about 25 minutes on the highway charging. Because that’s enough time for people to add 150 kilometres of range or more (using fast chargers).”
“They’ll leave their car and go about some other activities because there’s usually good amenities in these places. So they can occupy themselves, take a rest, refresh themselves, and then get on their way.”
“There are horror stories about queueing. We’ve only had isolated queueing on our network. It’s definitely something we need to manage as we go forward. The utilisation on the network is growing and that’s a good thing is from our perspective as a charging network operator. But we do need to keep pace with the build of the network.”
With the number of electric cars on the roads increasing each month, Evie Networks are learning about the charging habits of drivers. According to Conoplia, 50% of the customers registered with Evie have used the network in the last three months and they are following a ‘natural driver behaviour’ in relation to where and how long EV owners are charging their vehicles.
“We see a slightly longer dwell time in metropolitan areas. That’s usually a function of the type of activities that people are embarking on. So there’s a natural driver behaviour that people are following with a EVs that they would have always followed.”
“And we’re also seeing more convenience charging then we would have thought. When people are coming to a fast charger at their local shopping centre. And it’s just easy to plug in. It might cost them $10 to fill up their battery. And that’s done while they’re doing the shopping. And it’s a very convenient way of people charging. And it’s still very affordable compared to petrol.”
With plans to have 250 sites operating by the end of the year, EV owners can be confident that taking their electric car on the Christmas holiday road trip won’t mean spending hours in a queue waiting to charge.
