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Superchargers in Australia
- Thread starter JOH
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- Australia Supercharging
All good reasons, and not likely to change quickly, but charging to 100% is only going to make the congestion worse.
All the more reason to buy a Tesla.
Yes this could happen but it could also be argued that the slower charging EV owners are even more frugal so won't want to pay the higher cost to charge at Tesla SC. They might be happy to line up at NRMA freebies.
Someone mentioned this earlier, but its hard to believe the EV charging vendors (NRMA, chargefox, Evie) dont have SLA's with their chargers manufacturers. Any more than a day outage would breach most IT contracts in most other industries.
RareEarth
Member
I saw a Model 3 bypassing the supercharger queue there last week, raced over to the Chargefox units, plugged in ... and came back to the supercharger queue.
Chargefox and Evie in particular, since they are commercially operated. Those expensive chargers bring in exactly $0 for however long they are broken.
Would a shop or restaurant be happy with an 11 day outage of their EFTPOS capability over christmas?
Plus there's the repetitional damage where people will avoid a site where they have been burned previously, or has a bad plugshare score.
Why aren't these two operators raising hell with Tritium and/or switching brands? It's catastrophic to their business model.
Chuq
Active Member
That's the key.
Chargefox are switching to Kempower for a lot of their sites.
Evie and Tritium are owned by the same parent company, so they're not going to change.
It might also be that different SLAs have different costs, so it might just not make sense to have a tight SLA.
Or Tritium (and the other charging providers) may not be willing to provide tight SLAs.
Notably Tritium relies on others eg. ASX listed Rectifier Technologies for rectifiers in their 350kW units, someone else for the 50/75kW units, and I suspect other items like screens and modems as well.
NRMA for example have ultimately swapped out some machines after multiple failures - so possibly some of the fault is on them for not carrying multiple spares.
And if you look at the various videos (by Out of Spec and others) I get the feeling that the uptime of Tritium seems to be better than many of the four or five brands used by Electrify America.
Or Tritium (and the other charging providers) may not be willing to provide tight SLAs.
Notably Tritium relies on others eg. ASX listed Rectifier Technologies for rectifiers in their 350kW units, someone else for the 50/75kW units, and I suspect other items like screens and modems as well.
NRMA for example have ultimately swapped out some machines after multiple failures - so possibly some of the fault is on them for not carrying multiple spares.
And if you look at the various videos (by Out of Spec and others) I get the feeling that the uptime of Tritium seems to be better than many of the four or five brands used by Electrify America.
Unless I missed it, there's been nothing public about the nature of the commercial relationship these charging providers have for site maintenance and repair.
From what I see, it's entirely likely that some or all of these owners either have in-house maintenance teams or contract it to a third party. Either way, in-house maintenance, external contractors or SLAs all cost money and there's a good chance that the money just isn't there for gold class service.
There does seem to be a difference between the owners, as well - right now all of Evie's 350kW chargers in NSW are working except Taree (which looks to me like it might be a fault with the electrical switchgear since the whole site failed in one go) but Chargefox and NRMA both seem to have outages for extended periods.
It's all further complicated by the existence of third-party owned sites in both Evie and Chargefox networks, some of which they might be responsible for the maintenance of, and some of which the site owners are responsible for (eg. Dan Murphy's Batemans Bay).
Chuq
Active Member
Each operator will manage this differently.
For example, with Electric Highway Tasmania, when they built their initial network, due to cost and minimal demand, their network were entirely 1x 50 kW sites. Recognising that some were in remote locations and people would be dependent on them, they also installed an AC charger at each of these sites.
But in addition, they also ordered an entire spare Tritium 50 kW unit. They also have an arrangement with a local electrical installer (the same one who installed them) to have a 24-hour SLA to swap out a dead unit. The electrical installer's management are long time EV owners (like the EHT management) so understand the impact a failed charger can have.
I don't think they've actually had any full site failures in the time they've been operating - since early 2021 - occasional comms outages, vandalised credit card readers and people pressing the E-stop button. Nothing that wasn't quickly fixed.
As well as the new sites they are installing, they also plan to expand three of the original sites due to demand - I believe this will be a combination of new equipment at some sites (replacing a single Tritium with a more scalable hardware solution) and moving the former Tritium 50 kW unit(s) to convert other sites into 2x 50 kW units.
They're also installing a number of 25 kW DC in smaller towns at mid-points between their other sites, to provide further redundancy in case of a site being down (but also in case of people mis-calculating their remaining range).
So it *is* possible. Granted, it's over a smaller geographical area, and it's a lot easier in Tassie since their existing locations are at maximum 3 hours from Hobart (maybe a couple which will be 4+ hours once all their sites are built) and so it's practical for one company based at a single site to manage.
For example, with Electric Highway Tasmania, when they built their initial network, due to cost and minimal demand, their network were entirely 1x 50 kW sites. Recognising that some were in remote locations and people would be dependent on them, they also installed an AC charger at each of these sites.
But in addition, they also ordered an entire spare Tritium 50 kW unit. They also have an arrangement with a local electrical installer (the same one who installed them) to have a 24-hour SLA to swap out a dead unit. The electrical installer's management are long time EV owners (like the EHT management) so understand the impact a failed charger can have.
I don't think they've actually had any full site failures in the time they've been operating - since early 2021 - occasional comms outages, vandalised credit card readers and people pressing the E-stop button. Nothing that wasn't quickly fixed.
As well as the new sites they are installing, they also plan to expand three of the original sites due to demand - I believe this will be a combination of new equipment at some sites (replacing a single Tritium with a more scalable hardware solution) and moving the former Tritium 50 kW unit(s) to convert other sites into 2x 50 kW units.
They're also installing a number of 25 kW DC in smaller towns at mid-points between their other sites, to provide further redundancy in case of a site being down (but also in case of people mis-calculating their remaining range).
So it *is* possible. Granted, it's over a smaller geographical area, and it's a lot easier in Tassie since their existing locations are at maximum 3 hours from Hobart (maybe a couple which will be 4+ hours once all their sites are built) and so it's practical for one company based at a single site to manage.
I’m sure they are raising hell, where appropriate, but Evie was boasting that Taree is their only site in the country that is currently offline, and that one may not be a Tritium fault.
Evie is privately owned by Trevor St Baker’s Energy Innovation fund, and ARENA is also an investor but I don’t know the split.
Trevor St Baker’s Energy Innovation fund was also an early investor in Tritium, which is now publicly listed in the USA. The St Baker Energy Innovation fund owns 26% of Tritium.
So I doubt Evie will be changing DCFC hardware supplier.
The top-voted sites in Australia so far are:
- Apollo Bay
- Southern Cross
- Port Augusta
- Jindabyne
- Coober Pedy
Chuq
Active Member
There have been a few different groups online saying, "don't forget to vote for our official list of Australian sites to ensure we have the best chance". Of course these are different people in different various Facebook groups, so there's no real official list.
So here is my completely impartial method:
- Exclude sites which are already under construction, e.g. Cann River.
- Exclude sites which are already guaranteed to be built because they received govt funding, e.g. Orange, Jindabyne, Batemans Bay.
- Exclude sites in cities. These cities already have a number of superchargers, Tesla knows precisely how much they are used, how often, etc. and will build more in cities based on this demand.
- Prioritise sites that are close enough to the rest of the supercharger network (east or west coast networks) to benefit from the "network effect" of being part of a larger network
- De-prioritise sites that are so close to the existing network that they don't expand supercharger reach significantly.
- Southern Cross, WA
- Port Augusta, SA
- Campbell Town, Tas
- Apollo Bay, Vic
In reality, Tesla knows exactly where their cars go and where the superchargers are needed, I don't think the results make a difference and I think this is basically a big publicity/engagement thing for them, but go for it anyway.
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noddy@teamterm
Team Terminal
Because we have no superchargers up here I go with "How far will I be able to get from home before I need to charge, and has sufficient infrastructure to support a supercharger." and placed my vote in Katherine. Wasted I know but have to start somewhere.
True that.
And if you really want to encourage supercharging building, pressure your state government to provide some assistance.
As shown in NSW that works very well in pulling sites forward.
Agree tesla know where our cars go but tesla don’t really know if the cars would go where there is currently no supercharger. Its the ‘build it and they will come’ type arguement
