The 149 reasons for inner west EV owners like Peter not to fear range anxiety

When Peter McHenry decided to buy an electric car, he expected to be charging it at shopping centres and service stations.

The Annandale resident is one of the 30 per cent of NSW drivers who do not have access to private, off-street parking – a percentage higher in metropolitan areas, especially the inner city.

Peter McHenry won’t have to charge his EV at a shopping centre as a kerbside port has been installed outside his house.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Despite the potential hassle of charging, McHenry ordered a Kia electric SUV using a leasing arrangement through his work.

Last week, a solution arrived before his car: a kerbside charger mounted to the power pole on the nature strip outside his home.

It is one of 39 that Plus ES and AGL have so far installed in the inner west, including in Birchgrove, Balmain, Lewisham, Stanmore and Newtown, as part of government-funded rollout of 671 kerbside chargers across NSW. There will be 149 in the inner west, the biggest beneficiary of the grants.

The state is spending $4.1 million to bring the ports to 16 council areas, alongside $8 million in private investment. Other grant recipients have completed 16 kerbside chargers in Mosman Council and City of Sydney since May.

Plus ES and AGL will supply 100 per cent renewable or offset electricity, and it will be free until the end of January. McHenry’s car won’t arrive on time to take advantage of this offer, but he is happy with his decision for other reasons.

“The predominant reason would be the environmental reason – I have a seven-year-old daughter and I’m thinking about her future,” McHenry said.

His car has a 480-kilometre range, perfect for the weekend trips he’ll mostly use it for, so he won’t need to charge often. Aware of the environmental cost of lithium and other materials, he believes that will be outweighed by “driving around in a vehicle that has zero emissions”.

Fellow Annandale resident David Roche already owns an EV and has off-street parking with a charger. He has seen people go to great lengths to charge their cars.

“I’ve seen a couple of instances of extension cords running across the footpath to charge an EV, which is not a great option [because of the tripping hazard],” Roche said. “I also have a neighbour who has their own charger, but to access it, they have to drive down [a grassy street], and one time they got their car bogged.”

He has also seen photos of people trying to run their extension cords over a fishing pole to keep it off the ground.

Roche, who works in energy policy research at the University of Technology Sydney, said he has been encouraging Inner West Council to trial cable gullies – a groove in the pavement for the cable with a magnetic cover – so residents could use their own electricity, especially if they have solar panels.

Rob Amphlett Lewis, group executive of distributed services at Plus ES, said Australia had 35 electric vehicles per public charger, compared with a global average of 10 to one.

“We’re keen to make it a less scary choice to buy an electric vehicle, and we think if we do that … it will accelerate the transition from petrol to electric vehicles,” he said.

Jo Egan, chief customer officer at AGL, said the power company and Plus ES wanted to enable kerbside outlets for vehicle-to-grid charging now the Australian standard had been announced.

“Electric vehicles are such an important part of that journey here in Australia, and not just to help us decarbonise, but they will also play a really important role in the energy system,” Egan said.

Plus ES is a separate entity from Ausgrid but owned by the same shareholders and has some shared executives.

Ausgrid cannot directly own assets such as EV chargers because of ringfencing rules, but the company has been lobbying to change that. Speaking with his Ausgrid hat on, Amphlett Lewis said in July that electricity networks would be able to build infrastructure such as EV charging more efficiently and cheaply if they could do it directly.

However, EVX chief executive Andrew Forster said whenever the networks were allowed to offer customer-facing services, it “usually led to pretty poor outcomes and higher costs to consumers”. EVX is a competitor to Plus ES and part of the NSW government rollout.

“There seems to be this sort of PR machine around the fact that this is some sort of altruistic push to assist with the transition, when, in reality, our concern is that it’s more about a bit of a land grab,” Forster said.

A Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water spokesperson said it was investigating whether to allow networks to deliver kerbside EV charging as part of the refresh of the NSW Electric Vehicle Strategy, but no decision had been made.

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