Earlier this month the New South Wales government announced a near $6 million investment in EV charging across regional communities.
The program will deliver 159 new chargers at 48 locations, placed in rest areas on motorways, among other places.
The question remains: are enough projects being put in place to sustain the five million EVs on Aussie roads the federal government is targeting?
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Dr Soobok Yoon works as a PhD researcher at Monash University and said Australia is far behind where it needs to be in EV adoption and infrastructure.
"From a global perspective, Australia’s EV adoption and infrastructure in 2024 significantly lagged behind international peers,” Dr Yoon said.
“Of the approximately 11 million BEVs sold worldwide, Australia accounted for merely 91,000 units—just 0.83% of the global total.”
It’s not just the numbers of EVs that fall short of the federal government’s target, but also the number of available charging points is inadequate.
According to Dr Yoon, of the 5.4 million globally available charging points, Australia accounts for 0.1 per cent of those, and the majority of those are in NSW.
The NRMA has been one of the leading private organisations implementing electric vehicle charging in Australia. It will work with the NSW government on its latest 159 new charger initiative.
“We’re nowhere near. We’ve got nowhere near enough public charging,” NRMA spokesperson Peter Khoury said.
“There are lots of areas that don’t have energy that comes from outside the energy grid so you’ve got to create energy sources at those locations.”
The consequences of this is that the uptake of EVs in rural and regional areas is hard because the infrastructure cannot support it.
Dr Yoon said the significantly weaker rural grid networks could lead to system faults or even blackouts if EV adoption rapidly increased.
The bleak EV charging situation means that other initiatives are gathering steam, such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and grid-to-vehicle (G2V).
Through V2G, car power can be fed back into the grid, boosting networking efficiencies, according Electric Vehicle Council Head of Energy and Infrastructure Alina Dini.
“In times when there is peak demand and everyone is plugging something in at the same time, you can actually use your car to power your house or feed energy back into the grid for money,” she said.
It also helps to stabilise the grid during peak demand, and this type of technology could be beneficial for rural electric car owners as part of a smart charging framework.
“While the existing rural grid has clear physical limits on how many cars it can support, smart charging (G2V) allows us to accommodate a much higher number of EVs within that same infrastructure capacity,” Dr Yoon said.
Implementing such measures consistently across the country could reduce the burden of building public chargers.
Such exercises inherently presuppose. The prospect of five million EVs on Aussie roads is necessitated by the unrelenting uptake of them from buyers over the next 10 years.
With concerns over price, range and charging still prevalent in Australia, it remains to be seen whether these charging issues will come to fruition.
The average driving range of EVs has increased substantially over the past 10 years as have more affordable options popping up in the market, while charging times are also dropping.
But there has been less than 85,000 sales of new EVs in 2025.
“In the next five years we really want to see complete consumer acceptance for the technology,” Ms Dini said.
“It’s no longer an eco choice. It’s just a choice because it's the new technology that’s available and everyone wants it because it’s better than what we had before.”
