Electric Vehicles Infrastructure Investment Consultation
Consultation has concluded
Consultation closes Friday 20 March 2020.
Project Overview
Have your say on council investing in electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across the City of Clarence.
We would like to hear your thoughts on council partnering with businesses in Clarence to share costs and provide EV charging stations for community use. If you are in favour of this, we would also like to know where you think these stations should be located across the city.
Background
In alignment with our Strategic Plan 2016-2026, we are committed to encouraging energy conservation opportunities in relation to emerging and alternative technologies.
The use of zero emission electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engine vehicles can significantly reduce transport carbon emissions, thereby lessening the consequent impacts on climate change and health risks associated with air pollution.
The popularity of EVs is rapidly growing in the large consumer markets in Europe, Asia and North America. This is being led by vehicle manufacturers who have invested heavily to expand their EV offerings and improve the EV driving range and performance.
We recognise the increasing availability of EVs and acknowledge that a key factor hindering consumer uptake of EVs in Australia is the lack of recharging infrastructure.
Have Your Say
Have your say by:
- Completing our quick poll to indicate if you are for or against council partnering with businesses to provide EV charging stations across the city.
- Letting us know any ideas or concerns we need to consider by leaving a comment on our issues log book.
- Marking on our map where EV charging stations should be placed across the city.
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EV is only a temporary step until Hydrogen comes along - better spent on the latter.
Council would be better served by focusing on providing electric vehicle (EV) charging stations for Council's fleet vehicles, and transitioning the Council fleet to electric vehicles (not including some heavy vehicles). Because we are in Tasmania, these electric vehicles would run on 90% clean green renewable low carbon emission energy from the grid (apart from the small percentage that is imported from Victoria from its coal fired power stations). A successful transition to electric fleet vehicles would result in a significant reduction in Council's corporate greenhouse gas/carbon emissions. The Tasmanian Climate Change Office have researched electric vehicles thoroughly and some of the submissions on their website from electric vehicle associations, recommended that it will soon be commercially viable for business to establish charging infrastructure and cautioned against subsidising it. Council could help the community transition to electric vehicles by providing information to ratepayers to help them understand the complex new technology.
Vehicle manufacturers and power suppliers, eg, Aurora, who want to be in the EV market should be the ones to finance, as in the petroleum retailing industry.
Ratepayers would prioritise essential services as a basic need before donating to multinational car companies profits.
Happy for council to partner for EV charging infrastructure, but NOT at all happy that ratepayer funds from all ratepayers should be used to subside facilities for just a few who can afford EVs. Let the marketplace decide, commercial principles of supply/demand will fund EV infrastructure via non government entities if demand exists. However, CCC should 100% facilitate and support any initiatives to install EV infrastructure, just not pay for it with our money.
Environmental concerns aside, Tasmania could become almost completely independent of fuel imports if we adopted EV usage as quickly as possible.
I think council should concentrate on more basic service provision first, before going off into investing in these sort of projects. Decent public toilets at Bellerive Beach would be a good start.
I think the council should lead by example and instal chargers at your own depot and replace council vehicles with EV's.
EV charging should be a consideration on all new car parks or redevelopment/resurfacing of car parks. It's relatively cheap to do so at the point of initial construction.
Most locations in Clarence should probably be destination (slow) chargers - this will allow the council to add many chargers (in many locations) for the same amount of money as a single fast charging station.
An alternate option to Clarence operating the chargers themselves is to offer a $5k rebate to any commercial site that installs a charger that is accessible to the public.
There is a network of fast chargers being built around the state, scheduled to be done by mid this year. The nearest will be in Hobart CBD and the next one towards the east will be in Swansea. In the future, there may be demand for another location between these two, and to ensure funds are spent effectively, it wold be ideal if council staff could keep in contact with staff from Sorell and Glamorgan-Spring Bay councils to discuss plans in the region.
EV charge points at all major car parks around the municipality would be great, including tourist destinations. Also at each school so the kids can see how the new technology works.
I think the electric vehicle charging stations are an essential piece of infrastructure moving into the future. A proactive approach from council to start by at least setting up these in main locations would be great.