Sydney greatly expands charging infrastructure
Australian megacity Sydney has adopted a new electrification strategy. This includes doubling the number of charging stations in city parking lots and a comprehensive project to retrofit existing apartment buildings with chargers.
Sydney also plans to promote public fast chargers in parking lots and service stations, test on-street chargers on utility poles in residential neighbourhoods with Australian energy company Ausgrid, update charging infrastructure regulations for new buildings, and accelerate the conversion of its own fleets to electric vehicles. Currently, Sydney’s city fleet includes only 19 all-electric cars, one diesel truck converted to electric, and 73 hybrid cars and trucks.
About 20 per cent of emissions in the city, home to five million people, are caused by traffic. That is according to a statement from Lord Mayor Clover Moore. He announced 18 new charging stations at Goulburn Street and Kings Cross as specific measures, with another two 22-kWh chargers to be installed at the Cope Street parking lot in Redfern and the Wilson Street parking lot in Newtown. These charging stations will add to the 100 or so public charging points currently available in the city.
Together with Ausgrid, the city plans to “test an unobtrusive on-street electric vehicle charger on an existing power pole.” “In the city context, where over 75 per cent of people live in apartments, strata charging presents a real opportunity to make a significant dent in our charging needs, but it’s complicated,” says Mayor Moore.
As another measure, the city pledges to “support the state and federal government to encourage a faster uptake of electric vehicles in the private and commercial sectors through federal fuel efficiency standards, accelerating roll-out of zero-emission buses, and pricing mechanisms that favour electric vehicles over internal combustion engines (…).”
In 2019, the Australian state of New South Wales government decided to electrify Sydney’s bus fleet of around 8,000 vehicles in the coming years.
0 Comments