A $7 million investment will kick-start a national electric highway led by Fast Cities Australia.
Fast Cities Australia is a sister company to Brisbane fast charger maker Tritium, and linked to energy entrepreneur Trevor St Baker.
The investment has come from St Baker’s Energy Innovation Fund, allowing work to start on the nationwide charging project, which Fast Cities Australia says will give Australian EV drivers, fleet owners and manufacturers the confidence to go electric.
“We’re in roll-out phase,” Fast Cities Australia chief executive officer Chris Mills told RenewEconomy, starting with 42 sites, each with a minimum of two 350kW fast chargers.
Mills says it works out at about $1 million a site.
“So that initial investment ($7 million), that gets us going.
It allows us to issue out all of the instructions to our consultants, to find candidates for sites, to look into compliance, connectivity…”
The Fast Cities Australia initiative was launched almost four years ago, just after Tritium signed a deal to have its Veefil DC fast chargers installed across three countries in Europe.
Since then, Tritium has had success across Europe, setting up a base in Amsterdam, and increasing its Brisbane production base.
The company’s high-power chargers (HPCs) offer EV drivers 150km of range in five minutes – almost as fast as filling up a petrol tank.
Tritium recently secured a deal to supply up to six units of its HPCs to Ionity for about 100 sites.
Ionity is a joint venture including the BMW Group, Daimler, Ford and the Volkswagen Group for a pan-European network of about 400 charging stations.
Meanwhile, $100 million infrastructure project by Fast Cities Australia will see the first 16 sites between Brisbane and Melbourne installed by the end of 2019, with the remainder of the 42 sites to be completed by the end of 2021.
The fast charging sites would be within around 150km of each other.
Mills says most EV drivers don’t want to wait much longer than around 10-15 minutes to charge up en route – time enough for a rest break, coffee and perhaps a snack.
