Post Category → Policy

Five opportunities for the Government to get EV policy right

‘Curtain-raiser’ analysis in The Energy

As the Government seeks to mould transportation policy in the light of the transition and a war in Iran, it must build and maintain trust that will serve individual, community and national interests

This evening we’ll see a second term government, with unprecedented parliamentary majorities, deliver a budget response to the “hard new world” facing Australia abroad and the hard life facing many Australians at home.

In this context, the Government faces many hard decisions. Even considering just the narrow scope of decarbonising transport, the Government has at least five consequential and controversial issues to contend with: subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs), subsidies for EV charging infrastructure, network pricing for behind-the-meter and rapid EV charging, road user charges for EVs, and fuel excise.

Each of these is part of the bigger question: how do all Australians receive an equitable share of the benefits and carry an equitable share of costs of the transition to a clean transport system?

In addressing this question, it is worth reflecting upon the experience of decarbonising Australia’s electricity system. In particular, the importance of building and maintaining people’s trust in the transition as a project that serves individual, community and national interests, with equitably distributed costs and benefits.

This trust has been undermined by the real and/or perceived inequities between regional communities that host coal power stations and transmission lines and inner-city consumers; as well as between the ‘solar haves’ and ‘solar have-nots’, whose difference in experience has only grown with the incentivised roll-out of batteries.

Electrifying transport

Turning to specific transport decarbonisation policies, the first issue – of incentivising EV uptake through Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) exemptions – has already been announced ahead of the budget. This exemption will remain in place for until the end of March 2027, before being gradually phased out. This policy had been criticised as heavily biased to higher earners, and while the government noted that uptake has been highest outside of the inner cities, directing more than $1.4 billion to the top two tax brackets doesn’t pass the pub test for equity.

The Government has plenty of alternatives it could explore to counterbalance the FBT policy. Subsidising the electrification of taxis and buses would, for example, serve other parts of society and have high economic, environmental and fuel security benefits due to these vehicles’ high utilisation rates.

EV chargers

The second policy issue relates to expanding kerbside charging infrastructure for EVs. This infrastructure is critical for making EVs attractive, especially to those who don’t have access to off-street parking and those who rent or live in apartments. The Government has previously committed $40 million to support the growth of kerbside charging networks. This amount, humble compared to the billions spent on FBT exemptions, could be bolstered to expand the communities to whom kerbside charging would make EVs an option.

However, the issue of kerbside charging poses policy and regulatory challenges regarding who — between EV drivers, taxpayers and electricity consumers — should pay for this infrastructure. The Government’s subsidy program proposes taxpayers cover up to 30 per cent of costs, with electricity consumers covering the remainder through network charges. It furthermore proposes that commercial charging providers be allowed to cherrypick favourable sites, which risks pushing the costs to maintain the less favourable but still critically important sites  onto taxpayers and electricity consumers, without the cross-subsidisation of more profitable sites.

Network tariffs

The third policy issue pertains to how EV drivers should contribute to the upkeep of the electricity networks they use to charge. When charging at home or at work (or elsewhere ‘behind-the-meter’), EV drivers can avoid paying network fees by charging directly from rooftop solar. With EV charging adding a decent fraction of households’ energy consumption, this significantly increases the advantage of being a ‘solar have’, rather than a ‘solar have not’.

In response, the AEMC recently proposed to increase the fixed network charges paid by every customer. While it is commendable for the AEMC to advocate for equity (which its modelling suggests this reform would deliver), the volume of opposition highlights that distributional issues are not well suited to technocratic solutions, but require political leadership to justify the trade-offs across interest groups.

Another example of where this applies is the debate around how EV drivers should pay for the network when using fast-charging stations. Are demand tariffs the appropriate way of recovering the costs of these chargers’ bursts of high power consumption?

Road user charges

A fourth issue for policymakers is how to implement road-user charges. These charges are a way for EV drivers to contribute to state and federal budgets (notionally for road maintenance) in the absence of paying fuel excise. Once again, the delicacy is around the timing and magnitude of charges, so as to balance incentives for EV uptake with equitable cost distribution.

Fuel subsidies

Lastly, there is the issue of fuel excise itself. On the one hand, the Government is seeking to soften the blow to everyday Australians of the fuel price surges driven by the attacks on Iran; even if circumstances may ultimately require a reduction of fuel consumption. On the other hand, the Government is resisting pressure to place a cap on the Fuel Tax Credit scheme, which enables businesses to claim back the fuel tax they pay on diesel.

These credits were the 16th largest single expense in the 2025/26 budget, with an estimated cost of $10.8 billion. The proposal to cap diesel tax refunds at $50 million per company, per year – backed by Fortescue and IEEFA – would apply to around 18 of Australia’s biggest companies in mining – not farmers, fishers, small miners or truck drivers – and would boost the government budget by billions of dollars each year (and incentivise electrification).

For these five policy issues, and the question of Australians’ inclusive and equitable participation in the decarbonisation transition, this budget comes at a critical moment. The costs of inaction, of staying exposed to the volatility and precarity of fossil fuel supplies is indisputable and omnipresent, meanwhile the availability and attractiveness of clean alternatives is widely recognised and supported. But  there is a grave risk of losing the social license for the transition due to perceptions from voters that it isn’t benefiting all Australians, that its costs and benefits are being distributed inequitably, and/or that there is a lack of trust in the transparency with which trade-offs are being made.

None of the five policy issues have clear-cut answers. They each call upon the Government to make appropriate judgements – on each issue and the suite as a whole. But it is clear that the Government must communicate each decision with transparent reasoning and expected consequences. This is foundational to trust, and, as Chilli Heeler explained to her daughters Bluey and Bingo, “if there’s no trust, none of this [the world] is possible…  no roads, no power lines.”

Kerbside EV chargers must be treated like traffic lights to smooth electric car take-up, study finds

I came to kerbside EV charging from the perspective of the electricity system.

I now believe it’s a mistake to be treating kerbside chargers akin to streetlights: infrastructure to be deployed uniformly along every street (lest to have ‘blackspots’), with electricity system impacts front and center (baseload demand overnight).

Instead, kerbside chargers are much more like traffic lights: some streets need lots close together, some need them spread out, others none at all, and their impacts on the electricity system are secondary to how humans and cars flow through streetscapes.

This foregrounds the role of local councils as local planners and representatives of the (highly heterogeneous) local contexts of their communities.

Full interview in The Driven and below

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Australia needs thousands more kerbside EV chargers. Here’s how to roll them out fast and fairly

Article in The Conversation

Electric vehicles (EVs) are no longer a niche technology. Australians are buying them in growing numbers as petrol prices bite and the federal government continues its tax exemption until 2029.

The challenge now is to build the supporting charging infrastructure.

Fast and ultrafast chargers, which recharge a typical EV in 10–15 minutes, have proven to be commercially attractive, with the number of these chargers growing by 22% in 2025. This is because drivers will pay a premium to recharge quickly while travelling.

But they aren’t appropriate for everyday use. They’re too expensive, and place stress on EV batteries and the grid. They also risk aggravating metro-regional divisions, with regional communities hosting infrastructure that serves the needs of city travellers and not locals.

So, what’s the answer? Our new research crunched the data from 27,000 kerbside charging sessions and made it public in an effort to find out.

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Growing EV popularity is leading to queues at fast chargers. Could a kerbside charger network help?

Article in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/growing-ev-popularity-is-leading-to-queues-at-fast-chargers-could-a-kerbside-charger-network-help-279563

The war on Iran has made crystal clear how shaky our reliance on fossil fuels is. It’s no surprise electric vehicles and transport have become more appealing.

In Australia, sales of electric vehicles surged 40–50% in March.

That sudden surge came after ten months of relatively slow growth, during which battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles made up roughly 14% of new car sales. Industry groups saw the sluggishness as a sign of the difficulties in moving beyond early adopters to the much larger mainstream market.

This market includes people who live in apartments or inner city areas with no off street parking. In Sydney’s eastern suburbs, for example, 60% of residents live in apartments or townhouses, and 50% rent.

If the millions of Australians in this position are to go electric, they have to be confident in their ability to charge cheaply and conveniently. Relying on public fast chargers won’t be enough, as queues at chargers over Easter show.

These drivers will need a high quality public kerbside charging network, where drivers can park on a street, plug in a slower but much cheaper charger and head to the shops. In our new research, we lay out what a good kerbside network should look like.

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Presentation: Watt price equity?

IMHO, the energy system has 2 goals:
• Efficiency – minimizing total economic & ecological costs
• Equity – human wellbeing, individually and collectively

The (Nobel prize earning) Tinbergen rule stipulates that each of these goals requires its own policy instrument. Relying on 1 market price – to efficiently manage EV charging without inequitable punishing parents for cooking at 6pm – flies in the face of this.

So, what can be done? Late last year I had the privilege to speak my mind about this problem and potential solutions (spoiler: separating energy demand into an essential and a flexible component – which could just be EVs to start with) as part of a Victorian Council of Social Service event and in a presentation to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) economic research team.

The first preso was recorded

Slides and here

202411-Sturmberg-Energy_equityDownload

And context of the VCOSS project is https://vcoss.org.au/projects/2024/01/energy-health-nexus/

Flat fees for flexible EVs

This study builds upon the recently published Unplugged is inflexible report to explore one avenue by which EV drivers could be incentivised to: 

  1. plug their EVs in for extended durations, and  
  1. permit their vehicles to be charged flexibly.  

While there are many avenues by which this could be done, we here explore the potential for EV drivers to be offered very simple, flat retail offers based solely on how often they plug in their EVs and how much energy their EV consumes. This approach entirely removes considerations of when in the day vehicles are plugged in, which lightens the mental burden on drivers and may contribute to greater acceptance of managed charging. 

This concept is motivated by the belief that creating price-certainty, and ideally cost-certainty, is a core way in which electricity retailers create value for their customers. This EV charging arrangement engages customers (EV drivers) is a quid pro quo where retailers contribute their expertise and diversity of customers to manage pricing risk, and EV drivers contribute the flexibility of their charging demand. 

Our modelling shows that doubling the amount of time EVs are plugged in for reduces the cost of charging by half. To be clear, this requires nothing of EV drivers other than having their EV connected to a charger for longer periods, which enables more flexibly charging behaviour. 

To quantify the risk for retailers we conduct a statistical analysis in terms of the cost of EV charging per day or per kWh. This suggests that offering a fixed price per day may go beyond retailers’ risk appetite, making a fixed price per kWh the more attractive option. This is likely also fairer for customers as it charges for the precise amount of energy used. 

The addition of vehicle-to-grid increases the benefits of longer plug-in times by facilitating market arbitrage. Vehicles that are driven less than 40km per day and are plugged in to chargers for more than 8 hours a day (with vehicle-to-grid) can, on average, be charged at zero or negative cost. 

While outside of the scope of this study, we note that this same tariff concept (and simulation model) could be applied matching flexible EV charging with the generation of a collection of wind or solar farms. This would provide another way for a retailer to manage/fix their price exposure while simultaneously creating value for customers by charging vehicles with zero emissions power. 

Full report below

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Unplugged is inflexible – How drivers’ plug in behaviour determines the flexibility of electric vehicle (dis)charging

In a neat little project for the ACT Government I analyse the (IMO oft overlooked) critical step of when EV drivers plug in their vehicles. If they’re not plugged in for substantially longer than required for charging then EVs are not the fabulously flexible load that they could be.

202406-Unplugged-is-inflexibleDownload

Participation and sensemaking in electric vehicle field trials: A study of fleet vehicle-to-grid in Australia

We have just published a new article from the REVS V2G trial about how participants in a field trial – in this case, the fleet, sustainability and asset managers – make sense of and influence technologies when a group comes along wanting to deploy and test them.

We found unexpected effects which revealed insights about what configuration of V2G might be acceptable to fleet end users. If energy market participants want V2G to solve their problems (and make them profit), they need to do the flexibility work.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-grid is a niche technology that has the potential to benefit electricity markets and support more renewable energy in the grid. However, interest from prospective users in adopting V2G is not well understood, particularly in the context of fleet vehicles. Technology-oriented field trials can contribute to the development of niche technologies. Trials usually focus on making engineered systems work, institutional embedding and testing business models. However, through the participation of users they also provide the opportunity to explore processes of problem definition and the formation of social, ethical and cultural meanings. This article presents findings from the Realising Electric Vehicle-to-grid Services project, an Australian trial of vehicle-to-grid in a government-owned light passenger car fleet, aiming to explore co-productive processes as essential aspects of participatory technology development. Our data comprises interviews with organisational actors responsible for facilitating and mediating the trial, as well as others in similar organisational roles. Adopting ecologies of participation as a framework, it reveals the productive effects of these actors in mediating the local embedding of vehicle-to-grid. These findings challenge the framing of vehicle-to-grid as being a question of consumer acceptance and suggest that, for this promising technology to contribute to a more sustainable future, the electricity sector must accept more risk.

Full article: https://lnkd.in/eukchts2

A provocation – Who will drive Vehicle-to-Grid?

A “provocation” is my new favorite form of publication!

This article in Utility Magazine was a real pleasure to write and condenses many recent discussions.

Our main takeaway is this: “Our experience to date suggests that V2G may stand to be of greatest attraction “for the grid” and that there is much to be done “by the grid” to accelerate this innovation becoming a seamless part of the electric vehicle experience.”

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