Driving Change: The EV Revolution

[Doug McNamee] (1:55 - 2:55) 

Thanks for having me, firstly. So, I think the initial sort of outlook of the Australian EV landscape is actually pretty similar to a lot of the other markets. We've started really strong. 

We've had those initial early adopters jump on. Now is the hard part, which is you've got to get mass adoption. So, vehicle availability is obviously a key part of that. Different vehicle types. So, as we start to move into some of those bigger vehicles, like Utes and trucks and things like that, availability of those cars is going to be really key for mass adoption.

Having said all of that, at least the data that we've got from our own network is it continues to grow, continues to grow strongly.

And we've seen really, really strong sort of progress throughout 2024 around EV adoption. More vehicles come onto our network every month. The total number of charging sessions, total energy distributed every month grows month over month, which is great

It's really about that sort of middle of the, I guess, distribution curve and those people transitioning is going to be a bigger job because you're coming off a bigger base.

[Sarah Aubrey] (2:56 - 3:02)

Not what I've read in the press on many occasions. There we are. Rob, what's your perspective on that?

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (3:03 - 4:42)

Look, I think I agree with much of what Doug said. I think there's probably three things that I think are going to make a big difference. One is the price of EVs and they're coming down, the availability of various models and that's getting better, although Australia has been a bit of a laggard in manufacturers bringing their latest models to Australia.

The second thing I think is range anxiety and people rightly have a bit of anxiety about the distance that you can travel with an electric vehicle. Again, technology is catching up and really bringing a lot of those concerns down. Many people who buy EVs don't go on a long journey.

So, I think that's been the sort of early adopters as well. And then I think the third and the area where we feel we've got a role to play is in that availability of charging infrastructure and making sure that charging infrastructure is available to all who want to buy an EV. One of the things we've seen in some of the things that have happened in the energy transition, solar PV is a very good example, is that that opportunity has only been available to people who own their own homes and have roof space for solar PV.

And we worry a little bit that EV adoption is going to be a bit the same. If you don't have access to off-street parking, then really it's going to be much harder for you to make that decision to buy an electric vehicle. And so that's an area we've really been focused on.

What can Ausgrid do to solve that problem? Lean in, do more. And we've been wonderfully pleased with our partnership and collaboration with Jolt who are helping to address that concern.

But that really for us I think is one of the big challenges, making sure that people who want to buy an EV are confident that there'll be somewhere convenient for them to charge when they need to charge.

[Sarah Aubrey] (4:42 - 5:08)

And I am one of those people because I do not have a driveway and I don't actually own an EV yet, so there you go. Please solve that problem. I would appreciate it, that would be great.

All right, so Rob, I have a question for you. A key part of getting people's energy costs down is transitioning to EVs. But it does seem to have slowed down.

Why do you think that is? And what do you think needs to happen to make the transition faster and easier for people?

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (5:09 - 6:40)

So, I think, going back to my point, I think the availability of charging infrastructure is going to be a big driver of getting the non-early adopters over the line to buy an EV. And one of the things that we're seeing is that people who have off-street parking are largely those ones that have been the early adopters. So that cohort of people who are looking to buy an EV, wanting to make a difference, and have off-street parking, those are the people who have electric vehicles.

We've seen a bit of a taper off in terms of the numbers of people buying electric vehicles. I think it's about 7% or 8% of new electric vehicles. That's not jumped up this year, which is disappointing

[Sarah Aubrey]

Do you think that some of that is to do with disinformation?

[Rob Amphlett Lewis]

There'll always be different viewpoints expressed, and I think maybe there is some of that. I wouldn't be able to put a number on it.

I do think the inevitability of the EV revolution is clear to everyone. So, I think it's a matter of time rather than an if. I think it's a when.

And we have a responsibility to make sure that that when is earlier because it's such a big opportunity in terms of decarbonising our energy system and our ways of life is taking those ICE vehicles off the road and replacing them with electric vehicles, which are increasingly going to be powered by green energy, as we see the energy system itself decarbonised. So maybe misinformation, maybe it's just the ebbs and flows of people's purchase decisions. Maybe the cost-of-living crisis.

[Sarah Aubrey] (6:40 - 6:43)

Well, all vehicle sales went down last month rather than...

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (6:43 - 7:03)

Well, there you go, cost of living crisis biting. So, we don't think it's a long-term trend that this sort of ebb is occurring. I think we think it's inevitable, but we do think that there's a role for players like Jolt, players like Ausgrid to do more to solve some of those charging anxiety problems that people have.

[Sarah Aubrey] (7:03 - 7:49)

You mentioned before the range anxiety. It does seem to me the people who complain about that are people who don't own electric cars. And it's not so much the people that own electric cars.

And I love that expression, FUD, fear, uncertainty, doubt. And I feel like, I mean, I think the average Australian drives about 36 kilometres a day. And people immediately, you know, I get comments on my social media accounts saying, oh, but you know, what if I want to drive across the Nullarbor?

I've never driven across the Nullarbor and I have no plans to. And I do worry that we obsess over that. And it just seems to be an issue that's not going away.

And I just wonder how companies like Ausgrid or Jolt or people in this industry can try and disseminate that stuff.

[Doug McNamee] (7:50 - 9:01)

I mean, I think range anxiety is a bit of a catch-all, obviously for the distance the car can drive, but also availability of charging. And I think that those two are linked. So even if you're not driving very far and you don't have access to off-street parking, are you able to get on a charger that works?

Are you able to understand where those charges are? How easily are they accessible? And I think range anxiety, you know, is a catch-all for everything to do with that, I guess, transition to a different propulsion, you know, being electric and how you're actually going to facilitate that.

So for us, we kind of think about it, you know, as availability. So like, are there chargers that people can get onto? Do they work?

Do you have the response time to make sure that any issues are solved? Are you then able to make sure that people know how to find them? So, there's probably range anxiety even within cities, but it's really about like access to charging.

And that's a really important piece. So more opportunities to charge, more highly visible locations, you know, in Jolt's particular case, our charges are particularly unique and they're positioned in very visible locations, which we actually think is an aid to reducing range anxiety, because as you drive around, you can see them, you know, they're available, you see other people using them.

[Sarah Aubrey] (9:01 - 9:01)

Yeah, they're great.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (9:02 - 9:39)

But I do think there's a difference between charger availability anxiety and range anxiety. So I think if you live in a city, generally you're not doing the really long drives that make you worry about range, right? What you worry about is charger anxiety.

There are, there is a cohort of people who do drive long distances and they legitimately do have a concern about range. But again, the technology and the industry is responding to that. And you're seeing models coming out, which really put to bed a lot of those fears that people who genuinely drive long distances have.

But I think when we talk about range anxiety in a city sense, what we're actually meaning is charger availability anxiety.

[Sarah Aubrey] (9:40 - 9:50)

Yeah, true.

So Doug, a key concern is, you know, charging availability, particularly at home. How do we solve the problem of charging availability and the convenience issue?

[Doug McNamee] (9:50 - 11:08)

So, Jolt is targeting those people or the service that we provide facilitates people who don't have access to charging at home to charge. So, we build chargers in cities at a curbside level that are available 24 seven and they're DC fast chargers. So, what we've sort of understood about the market is about 30% of people have to do 100% of their charging on third-party infrastructure in cities.

And then even some areas that's as high as say 50%. You know, when you think about higher density, where you've got traditional sort of like terrace housing and, you know, older apartments, that number is very, very high. So, you know, the way that we're trying to solve that is large scale networks across, you know, urban environments that are really visible, really easy, accessible, low cost to use.

So, Jolt's model is obviously got a freemium model. So, we do seven kilowatt hours per day per person, after which time you can charge, which really gets the price of energy down to being equivalent or cheaper than charging at home. You know, so that's a really important thing.

It's like availability of charging, making sure it works, making sure it's not cost prohibitive because really those that don't have access to off-street parking are typically, you know, maybe lower income earners. And so, making sure that we're not penalising them to transition to EV is obviously very important as well.

[Sarah Aubrey] (11:08 - 11:17)

I do think there is that issue of fairness when it comes to EV charging. I mean, we're all equal at the petrol bowser. That is not the case when it comes to electric vehicles.

[Doug McNamee] (11:17 - 11:18)

Solar rooftop, right?

[Sarah Aubrey] (11:18 - 11:26)

Or I'm on an EV plan and I'm paying cents on the dollar for a kilowatt hour overnight. It just seems really unfair then you're paying what five times that potentially at a charger.

[Doug McNamee] (11:26 - 12:11)

Yeah, and we've built some products to try and deal with that. So, we've got a product called Jolt Plus Flex, which offers off-peak charging. So that gives you really low cost charging overnight.

So, if you kind of benefit the same as somebody would with off-peak charging at home, you know, it's really about how do we bring that same at-home charging costs and experience to everyone else in the city? Is really what's going to be the key. Like we talked about it at the start, you know, we've got this huge job to do, which is converting those that aren't early adopters to EV.

And so, to make sure that we do that, it's about how do you build the infrastructure fast enough? How do you make sure it's low cost enough? How do you make sure it's reliable enough?

These are like big infrastructure problems that need very large, both capital investments, but also, you know, really customer focused solutions as well.

[Sarah Aubrey] (12:12 - 12:48)

Do you think we've focused a lot when we were talking about public charging seems that there was a real push to do regional charging, thinking about people doing those longer distances and we've kind of not really thought enough or only really now that we're really thinking about those, like where I live in the Inner West of Sydney, 67% of households cannot charge at home. 

And it's probably higher than that because people's garages are full of crap and they don't put stuff in there, right? And it's like, I just, to me, more and more electric cars are appearing in my area, but those charges that we have, they are busy.

They're really busy. And that is a bit stressful.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (12:49 - 13:55)

One of the things, I totally agree. One of the things that we worry about is that the charges tend to be rolled out at the moment where there are high penetrations of electric vehicles. And so that means that the charger comes once the vehicle's been bought.

In reality, it's the arrival of the charger that gives people the confidence to buy electric vehicles. And I think our hypothesis is if we made electric vehicle charging on the kerbside much easier, it gave people confidence that they'd come home, be able to find a spot on their street where they could plug in, leave their car till the morning, come back and find it fully charged, then you'd see the rates of EV adoption rise significantly in those areas. And I think anecdotally, we know that, right?

When we see electric vehicle charger go in, you'd start with levels of use in your charges that were quite low, but soon enough, people buy electric vehicles because they know there's a charger there. So, I think there's almost an obligation, a social obligation on us all to try and get these charges in as soon as possible in order to give people the confidence to buy those electric vehicles.

[Sarah Aubrey] (13:55 - 14:02)

I think it's the key, other than also getting people behind the wheel of an electric car so they see how good instant torque is.

[Doug McNamee] (14:03 - 15:11)

The thing I'd say to add to that is it is an infrastructure problem that people don't bring an infrastructure mindset to. So, you kind of look at an electric charger and you say, oh, that's just like a souped-up power plug. But really, it's infrastructure in the same way a toll road is or a bridge.

And you need to have a very deliberate build before the demand kind of approach to it. Because one of the things that we've seen, so we're fortunate enough to obviously operate here in partnership with Ausgrid, but we're in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK. And what we've found as like the single biggest unlock is the translation of this sort of 2030 objective to action today.

Because if we're talking about building 20,000 chargers across New South Wales, that is huge amounts of infrastructure that needs to be built and started to be built today. Because you're doing 20,000 new connections, you've got 20,000 car parks that need to have the bay markings changed. All of the things that go along with that, you need to have this very large-scale infrastructure mindset.

And we just don't have yet got that ambition. We're still really doing, oh, we'll do 10 chargers here, 20 chargers there. It's like, no, you need to do 250 chargers there.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (15:11 - 16:09)

We need to do 11,000 chargers in Ausgrid's area alone. And I think that this is exactly right. And in some ways, this is where government comes in and where industry needs to be thinking about whole of system costs.

You think about destination chargers that go into shopping centres or go into places where people visit. And that's often, and Jolt does some very good ones, that that is often to try and solve the problem of there not being curbside chargers in an area. So, people have somewhere to go to charge.

Those are faster chargers. Fast chargers put more stress on the system than overnight curbside chargers. So in some ways, the absence of curbside chargers may require more fast chargers, which put more stress on the system than having lots of curbside chargers would.

And so in some ways, getting ahead of the curve gives us a, it brings EV adoption forward and likely gives us a lower overall system costs than responding with fast chargers or destination chargers behind demand as a result of the fact that people aren't happy about not having chargers.

[Sarah Aubrey] (16:09 - 16:53)

The thing I like about Jolt as well is that you're, you know, we clutter our streets with so many things. There's NBN boxes everywhere and there's all sorts of things in the way, but you're using something that's already there, right? You're using those big Ausgrid boxes, right?

And you're putting the charge there and actually making it look a lot nicer than it did before, which I love. Do you think also there maybe is a bit of a behavioural change with those early adopters we were talking about? Because if you've got free chargers, like those destination ones, say for example, at supermarkets, I'll just plug in because, you know, it's free energy.

And even though they can charge at home, there's a bit of that going on as well. We need to potentially be like, if you can charge at home, maybe just don't charge at those. I feel like maybe there needs to be a bit of behavioural change going on.

[Doug McNamee] (16:53 - 17:38)

I mean, I think early on, we were definitely seeing that. I think now we're starting to see, you know, for us, we've got, you know, a lot of demand on the chargers. You've got it.

We've got reservation features now, wait time predictions to try and move people through. So, you know, I think there's probably a little bit less of that. For us in particular, 67% of all the energy that goes through our network is paid for.

So, it's not like people are just getting free power and then just moving on. So, I think the role that we play is definitely, you know, similar to what you've described, which is the vast majority of those people that don't have access to at-home charging rely on us to do a lot of their charging. You know, we see typically the Jolt customer we see is five times a month.

So, it's very, you know, it's a very frequent, very high usage, you know.

[Sarah Aubrey] (17:39 - 17:41)

And usually utilising the same charger that they're coming back to.

[Doug McNamee] (17:41 - 17:44)

Yeah. So, 97% of people charge on one charger.

[Sarah Aubrey] (17:44 - 17:45)

Wow.

[Doug McNamee] (17:45 - 18:31)

Yeah. So it's really a very hyper local, you know, if you have a charger within your area, then that charger is what you use to essentially go out and purchase your vehicle. So, to what we were talking about earlier, to build ahead of EV adoption is really critical because we know that people actually do it.

So much so that we actually know that people download the Jolt app before their vehicle arrives because we've got the data to say you go out and buy your vehicle. You know where your local Jolt charger is or whichever charging network you do. You then download the app.

You're then ready. You go, I know I can charge there. Then your vehicle comes and then you start using it.

So it's very much a, you know, the kind of view that we've sort of taken is, you know, you want to have a charger within one kilometre of every single person in, you know, every major city to really realize the EV, you know, adoption.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (18:31 - 18:49)

I think, you know, I've got to go one step further than that. You talk about five visits a month, you know, really, as an EV owner, you need to charge your car no more than once a week, right? And so for me, it's less about the sort of within 1K.

I want to see people having access to chargers on their streets.

[Sarah Aubrey] (18:49 - 18:51)

I would love a charger on every street, please.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (18:52 - 19:55)

And more than one, because if you have, you know, effectively, if everyone's charging once every seven nights, you only need a charger for every seven houses if you get the behavioural stuff right. And that makes an EV just so easy because you're never having to take a decision to charge. You're just getting home from work or getting home from the shopping.

You're parking a charger and you plug it in and that's all you have to think about. So, you know, for me, if we can get to the situation where people have the confidence that when they come home, you know, two out of three times a week, there'll be an EV charger available for them on the street and they can plug in. And ideally, they can charge their bill to their Jolt account or to whatever account that they want through any charger.

And ideally, even charge it to your own home electricity account so that effectively, you're getting one bill for electricity from whatever charger you seek to use. That's the customer experience that I think will really unlock the EV revolution for everyone and make sure that EV adoption accelerates in the way we all want to see it happen.

[Sarah Aubrey] (19:55 - 20:00)

And making it easier for people. There's so many different apps. I mean, people, does Jolt have tap and pay yet?

[Doug McNamee] (20:01 - 20:15)

We do in other markets. We don't have it here. And that's only because it's hard and expensive to do.

So very few, the data that we've got is only 1% of transactions on our London network where we've got tap and pay, use tap and pay.

[Sarah Aubrey] (20:15 - 20:16)

Really?

[Doug McNamee] (20:16 - 21:28)

Well, because to go back to what I said earlier, 97% of people using the same charger. So, you get a much better user experience through the app. And what the app does is allow us to have much more predictive, like we've got self-healing and a whole series of features that operate within the app.

So, if you get an error from the car or anything like that, you won't notice, but we'll be like fixing it in the background so that you have a successful charging experience. So, you can't do that with tap and pay because you can't see the errors. You know, having said that, do I think tap and pay may be becoming more ubiquitous?

Probably will. It's probably something that we might add to our Australian network. But the data in the UK suggests that it is convenient, but not a huge number of people will actually use it.

Because again, if you're thinking about our particular network, we don't see very many visitors as in people are using our network within their residential area because we're in cities. If we were on highways, I think totally, right? Like if I'm driving from here to Wagga or something and I needed to go to charging networks that I don't usually use, tap and pay is perfectly fine for that.

But being able to kind of do predictive, you know, responses and be able to kind of fix things in the background, that's what the app does.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (21:29 - 21:43)

I think it's usually interesting, isn't it, that you're getting such a low uptake of tap and pay because your customer experience on your app is so good. And I think that's the evolution of this is that businesses like yourselves learn what it is that a customer wants, and you get good at delivering it.

[Sarah Aubrey] (21:44 - 22:10)

It's a very easy app to use, I have to say. It's very simple. OK, so the grid wasn't built with EVs in mind and we've seen some of the challenges that solar has created for networks.

I'd like to hear the perspective from each of you on how ready you think we are for EVs. I get that one all the time, the grid can't take it if everyone goes to EVs. So how might you propose tackling some of those challenges?

I'll start with you, Rob.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (22:10 - 24:37)

Well, I think the challenge is bigger than you've just described it in many ways. You know, at the moment, as a society, we have three fuel networks. We have the electricity network, we have the gas network and we have the petrol network.

And effectively, I think we all know that inevitably two of those networks are probably going to come to an end of useful life. You know, the petrol network because EVs will become ubiquitous and the gas network is likely to end as we move to a fully decarbonised energy system. So effectively, we're asking the electricity network to do what three networks did before and we're asking the electricity network at the same time to operate in a way that it's never, ever operated before.

So that's a huge challenge, right? And it's an exciting challenge is why I get out of bed every morning because this is something that is really going to make a lasting change for society. Is the electricity network ready for 100% EV adoption?

No, nor should it have ever been built to be ready for 100% EV adoption. That will happen over time and our business, just like other distribution businesses, will evolve to make sure that the network operates as it should. But in going through this transition, we've got to think about how we do it in the least cost way.

And so, things like scheduling charging so that not all charging happens at 6pm when they get their cars home and we add to the peak demand of the evening. You know, smart technology that allows people to get a better deal by having their car slowly charged or maybe delayed the start of their charging until later in the evening or even encouraged to charge during the day. So, fitting loads into where there's ubiquitous availability or a surplus of solar PV or when there's capacity in the network, that allows us to accommodate the extra loads in a way that's much more efficient and lower cost.

And that's really what we as electricity networks are thinking about a lot. Some of that's about tariffs and making sure we've got charges available. Some of that's about technology and making sure that we're allowing businesses like Jolt to benefit from being thoughtful about when they charge.

So, there's a number of different things that we're doing in terms of connection agreements and tariffs. And also, of course, we'll be inevitably we'll be building some infrastructure where there are those bottlenecks. But I'm confident that the industry will keep pace and make sure that we're not we're never in a situation where we're preventing people from charging their electric vehicle.

That's the goal.

[Doug McNamee] (24:39 - 26:11)

Well, I mean, I certainly can come at it from trying to connect to the grid. So, we've done a couple of things, obviously, in part of this grid is trying to put our charges in places where there is capacity. So, building our charges, you know, in partnership with Ausgrid on existing Ausgrid infrastructure where there's capacity is obviously the first thing.

So, trying to place them in intelligent ways within the network. I think what Jolt does as well is we've got a distributed load, distributed demand kind of philosophy. So as opposed to putting large amounts of charges on a single connection, which the grid's not necessarily that well set up for.

We actually have lots of chargers spread out across an area. So, we have individual connections for each of our charges. And the idea of that is, you know, essentially the grid is energy that flows one way, and it steps down to a certain level.

If you fit within that level and you spread your load out across the grid, I think it makes it a little bit easier for connections to come in. So, I think it's a two-way street. You know, obviously, sometimes CPOs can be frustrated about getting their grid connections.

But if you work in the network operators to say, you know, how can we do this in partnership with you or in an intelligent way? I think it makes it a lot easier to speed up the adoption of EV. So, you know, we try and size our charges, you know, so that they can fit within the existing capacity of the network, place them in areas where there's existing capacity.

And then also just making sure that we're, you know, obviously always talking with the network about, you know, here's some chargers that are going to come in here. Is that going to be a problem? How should we be thinking about it?

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (26:11 - 26:51)

Yes, spot on. And I think the other thing is kerbside charges, overnight charges, trickle charges, as we call them occasionally. Those are fairly low kilowatt, and they charge a car fully overnight, but they don't put a huge amount of stress on the system.

As soon as you get to destination chargers where you're looking to get that charge done in an hour or two and even, you know, even more when you're going to those, you know, mid route charges where you really want to charge your vehicle in 15 minutes. Those sorts of charges put a huge amount of stress on the grid. So, the more that people are charging at home overnight using the trickle charges or the AC charges, the easier it is for the electricity system to accommodate it.

[Sarah Aubrey] (26:51 - 26:55)

And I assume then putting that in is also a lot easier in terms of...

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (26:55 - 27:11)

Much easier. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we've got pole mounted charges now rolling out across Sydney.

It's relatively easy and low cost for us to hang a charger on a power pole with the connection at the top of the power pole. It's a simple exercise.

[Sarah Aubrey] (27:11 - 27:12)

7 kilowatt charges.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (27:12 - 27:15) 

7 kilowatts. Yeah, generally. Yeah.

And... 

[Sarah Aubrey] (27:15 - 27:17) 

Sorry, can you explain what a CPO is as well, Doug? 

[Doug McNamee] (27:17 - 27:19) 

Oh, sorry. A charge point operator. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (27:19 - 27:20) 

Thank you so much.

[Doug McNamee]

That would be a network. 

[Doug McNamee] (27:20 - 27:25) 

So, Jolt is a network, like a charge point operator. So, they're the people that own and manage the charges. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (27:26 - 27:35)

OK, let's discuss why not everyone thinks that networks should play in this space. Why wouldn't this be a competitive service? Rob, what's your take on this?

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (27:36 - 29:38)

Well, I think the sale of energy is a competitive market and we're very supportive of that. Ausgrid's role is providing a connection to the network for your home. And we believe that we have a responsibility to provide a connection to the network for your car.

We wouldn't ever propose that there should be a monopoly over the sale of the electrons. I think the competition and charge point operator competition gives great customer benefits, and you see the innovations that Jolt's putting forward and market leading in many ways. What we do think is that there's a role for networks to provide that physical infrastructure on the street that the individuals can plug into.

Why do I think that we have an opportunity to contribute there? I think that because of what we talked about, the causality dilemma and competitive businesses often investing after the case rather than before. And I think we can support government in achieving socioeconomic outcomes by investing in those sorts of chargers in areas where there isn't the EV adoption at the moment, what we want to see it. 

The other thing, obviously, we run a large workforce that manages electrical infrastructure in the community, and we have 100 years of experience in doing that. And so that means that we can really manage service outcomes and uptime availability of charges in probably a much more efficient way than a multitude of different operators could. And I think that social equity responsibility to make sure that these are community assets and everyone in the community has an opportunity to charge when they want to. 

That's very much akin to what the grid does today. We are a community asset. It's a shared asset that everyone utilises. 

And I don't think it's a particularly big stretch to move to electric vehicle. The infrastructure that you plug into being part of that, conceived as part of that shared community asset, which is the electricity network. 

[Doug McNamee] (29:39 - 31:20) 

I think the way I can best answer that is to why we don't do AC charging. So electric EV charging networks are very expensive to run. You know, you need to have a 99 percent uptime. 

You need to make sure everyone who visits that asset comes away with power. We've gone down the route that to be able to do that, we need to distribute larger amounts of energy so that we can actually afford to go out and service those assets. So, for us, it's very much DC fast charging. 

It needs to be much more, I guess, energy distribution flow to then be able to service those assets, service those assets in a preventative way. AC charging is sort of like competing with the three-pin socket in your garage. And for us, we don't have the capacity to actually do that in any sort of meaningful way, because it's very expensive infrastructure. 

It costs a lot to fix. It costs a lot of money to put out there. You need to make sure that you've got the, I guess, cost of capital to be able to afford to do that. 

And private CPO networks typically are subscale and can't afford to do that. So, for Jolt, we've very much gone down a deliberate DC route, you know, 25, 50-kilowatt DC charges, which, you know, you can essentially charge your car in, you know, under an hour. You know, the 50 kilowatts there is certainly that fast. 

And so, it takes scale. It takes low-cost capital. It takes a lot of preventative maintenance to really get that network to do what you need to do, which is why a lot of CPOs have sort of you know, not necessarily gone a long way in that large scale public AC market. 

So, you're actually filling, there's a gap there, right? 

[Sarah Aubrey] (31:20 - 31:30)

Because you're basically putting in a charger, which is equivalent to what somebody has put as a charger in their home in their garage. They've got a seven-kilowatt charger there, and that's what they're exactly benefiting from at home. 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (31:30 - 31:58)

Yeah, and we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't see ourselves as having a role stepping into the market that Jolt looks after. We really see there is a gap and who's best placed to fill that gap. We don't see any other player that has the sort of capabilities that Doug was talking about, you know, experience running infrastructure, scale to run this sort of infrastructure who can solve that socioeconomic issue. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (31:59 - 32:02)

Would that be a monopoly though? Or would other players be able to come in and do that? 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (32:02 - 32:33)

Well, we would not have the view that we should do all AC charging. Not at all. But we do think that there is a gap where there is an absence or a lack of overnight charging at the curbside. 

And we have a role that we can go in and put the infrastructure in. But people would be buying their electrons, just as they do in their home from a retailer, or a charge point operator. They wouldn't be buying them from Ausgrid. 

We'd simply be doing pretty much as we do for your home, providing that infrastructure that allows you to connect your car to the network. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (32:34 - 33:04) 

Those health benefits are not, I don't know, we don't talk about them a great deal. You know, people go, oh, you know, electric cars aren't paying for the roads and all this sort of thing, which is not true. And that's a whole subject in itself. 

But if you have fewer people dropping dead from strokes and lung disease and asthma and being made sick by the pollution in our cities, that saves our governments billions upon billions of dollars. And so that does have a flow on effect in terms of putting money back into the coffers and being able to spend it elsewhere. 

[Doug McNamee] (33:04 - 34:15) 

Yeah, it's really huge. So, you know, we operate an EV charging network in London and there's actually air quality monitors on each of the streets. So, depending on essentially how many cars drive down the air quality varies street by street and people will actually take different bike ways to get to work following the higher quality streets, which is hugely, you know, it's crazy, right? 

Like it's obviously unique to London being flat. And, you know, so a lot of the pollution gets trapped. But it's quite cool. 

And so, you know, the EVs like, you know, a street with more EVs on it is actually like a better-quality street to then walk down. And people are now like monitoring it. 

So, it's very cool. So, it's the same here. You know, I think, you know, it's probably one of those things that we don't think about as much, as you say. 

And I don't think we're necessarily talking about it because I think, you know, what we've always focused on we as a company and I think more broadly is we have to convince individuals and individuals are obviously going to think about, you know, those things that are important to them, cost of living, you know, quality of life, you know, technological risk, all of those things. So, we need to solve them first. But to your point, it is still very real, the long-term benefit that the energy transition and EV transition is playing. 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (34:18 - 34:59) 

Yeah, I'd agree with all of that. I think one of the things that people, the criticisms that people throw at EV as a means of decarbonising is they say, well, you know, the electricity system is largely coal based. And so, I'm moving from from petrol to coal. 

And, you know, in its simplest of ways, there's a modicum of truth to that. But the reality is that we have a pretty well thought through plan for decarbonising our energy system. And you're not going to see coal built, unlikely that you'll see a lot of coal built. 

And you've got a big plan for making sure that the future generation suite is carbon free. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (35:00 - 35:03) 

And the grid isn't 100% coal. 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (35:03 - 35:22) 

And it isn't today. I mean, that's absolutely right. So look, I think, you know, if you move from a petrol vehicle to an electric vehicle, you know, you're contributing to that transition. 

And I think that's a positive thing. I think it's a positive thing for everyone, just for the reasons Doug outlined. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (35:23 - 35:34) 

Before we close, I'm going to ask the question that we ask everyone at the end of the podcast. What are the main things that need to change for a better energy transition? Let's start with you, Rob. 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (35:35 - 36:39) 

So, you know, let's start with electric vehicle charging infrastructure. You know, getting electric vehicles on the road, replacing ICE vehicles is a really important part of getting carbon out of our society. And to do that, as we've discussed, we really need to see more electric vehicle charging infrastructure around people's homes. 

So, giving that access to electric vehicle charging for people who don't have off street parking. You know, in Ausgrid's network alone, we estimate we need about 11,000 vehicles to give 11,000 chargers to give everyone who doesn't have off street parking confidence that they'll be able to access a charger once a week to charge their vehicle. So that's a huge, huge challenge. 

And we think that the network is really well placed to invest ahead of demand, really spur that uptake of electric vehicles. We've seen that happen where electric vehicle charges go in and people buy electric vehicles. So, we think there's a real need to get that electric vehicle charging infrastructure into the community ahead of demand to spur demand to really reduce our transport related emissions. 

[Doug McNamee] (36:39 - 37:45) 

So, I think from from our side, you know, building large scale, highly dense EV charging networks is the critical unlock for EVs across cities. And, you know, translating 2030 objectives down to, you know, 2024 infrastructure rollout plans is the missing piece. We've got this really good ambition, whether it's at a federal level, even at a state level.

You know, I think the objective in New South Wales was 30,000 charges in three years. But actually translating that down to, you know, on the ground infrastructure is something that we need a whole of government solution for, you know, actually going and looking at housing density, you know, looking at all the vehicle ownership and going, you know, we need larger scale programs and they need to be starting now for us to be able to get anywhere near our like, you know, objectives around energy transition is the you can't it's just can't happen fast enough. And I think, you know, obviously the program that Ausgrid's talking about, you know, making a sort of widely available, ubiquitous, low charge, you know, AC charging network that everyone can access makes a ton of sense.

[Sarah Aubrey] (37:45 - 37:53)

 hope we don't get to the point where it's like crunch. We've got way too many cars on the road, and we just don't have enough where potentially that is a problem.

[Doug McNamee] (37:53 - 37:57)

We install a charger; we'll have queuing within hours of it being.

[Sarah Aubrey] (37:57 - 37:57)

Really?

[Doug McNamee] (37:57 - 39:00) 

Yeah, we're already there. Like we've had to do wait time predictions. We've had to do reservations. 

We're looking at like a deli ticketing system to actually get people to have a queue, a digital queue. It's a real problem because it just can't happen fast enough. And, you know, there's everybody's involved in that, but you do things like, you know, we still now building in Sydney and we've been doing it for years, still have to do like four week consultation and, you know, three traffic committees to just change one sign to be EV charging only. 

And you kind of look at that and you go, wow, like how are we going to do this? You know, at scale, you're going to do 11,000 of them. It's just going to clog the system. 

So, we need to have, you know, a really like a real hard look at how the incentives set up within the system. Are there opportunities to accelerate and improve? You know, we definitely know that there are. 

There's been some success stories globally. It's like, how do we bring the best of those outcomes into Australia to go? We've got a serious, you know, once in a generation infrastructure challenge that we've got to build, and we need to like rapidly accelerate to really get where we need to go.

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (39:00 - 39:12) 

And that's why I think at Ausgrid we feel there's a real opportunity for us to accelerate at a lower cost and with pole mounted kerbside EV charging, you know, in a in quite a low social impact way. 

[Sarah Aubrey] (39:13 - 39:18) 

Well, thank you so much for coming in today. That was so fantastic. Rob and Doug, thank you for sharing your valuable insights. 

[Rob Amphlett Lewis] (39:19 - 39:21) 

Been an absolute pleasure. 

[Doug McNamee]

Thank you very much.

[Sarah Aubrey] (39:21 - 40:00)

How can your home drive Australia's energy future? Join us next episode as we dive into electrification of the home and uncover why getting gas out of households matters, the benefits of going electric and how the energy industry can support this shift from saving money and reducing emissions to the grid's evolving role in this transition. This episode is packed with insights to empower your journey.

Don't miss it. For more info on today's episode, visit www.wiredforgood.com.au Don't forget to follow us on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.