The EV Charging Podcast
The EV Charging podcast explores the journeys of founders and leaders of Electric Vehicle charging organisations in the Australian market and around the world. We uncover the funny stories of the early days of the Electric Vehicle market, the key dynamics of today's environment and stargaze towards some of the exciting innovations that are already on the way. This podcast is hosted by www.solarchoice.net.au
The EV Charging Podcast
#4 Ross De Rango: EV Charging in Apartment Buildings
Ross De Rango, from the Electric Vehicle Council explains the challenges and solutions for installing EV chargers in apartment buildings while addressing common misconceptions about EV fire safety and implementation costs.
- Electric Vehicle Council works on policy advocacy, industry development, and facilitating connections between stakeholders
- About 10.5% of Australians (2.6 million people) live in approximately 1.2 million apartment dwellings
- Apartment EV charging faces unique challenges including common property issues and electrical capacity limitations
- Approval processes vary by state with different voting thresholds (50% in NSW, 75% in Queensland and Victoria)
- Solutions range from simple power points ($4,000 for eight parking bays) to comprehensive building-wide systems
- EVs are far less likely to catch fire than petrol/diesel vehicles, with Fire Rescue NSW responding to seven vehicle fires daily
- Apartment buildings that don't support EV charging will likely see reduced property values and rental yields
- Vehicle-to-grid technology will allow EVs to support the energy grid and help phase out fossil fuel power plants
- By 2030, electric vehicles will likely represent 10-15% of vehicles on Australian roads
Find out more at solarchoice.net.au and stay tuned for our next episode in two weeks.
G'day everyone. Welcome to the EV Charging Podcast, where we take you behind the scenes of the electric vehicle charging industry in Australia and around the world. I'm Geoff Sykes and I'm Daniel Carson and we're your hosts from Solar Choice, australia's largest independent quote comparison service covering solar batteries, ev chargers, heat pumps and aircon.
Speaker 2:Today we've got an interview with Ross Durango from the Electric Vehicle Council. Ross is a really important figure in the Australian EV charging scene and, along with the EV Council, has done some great work informing government policy, working on research projects that have helped shape the industry into what it is today. We chose to talk to Ross about electric vehicle charging in apartments because that's an area that we've worked with him before. He's got an incredible amount of knowledge and I'm sure this will be a useful episode for anyone who's living in an apartment and thinking about purchasing an EV. Welcome, Ross, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 2:To get us started. It might be useful for our audience if you could maybe give us a bit of background on yourself. How did you find yourself working at the Electric Vehicle Council? What does that path look like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks. So my name's Ross. I'm a robotics engineer by background. People who are listening to this podcast are probably familiar with NHP. I spent 13 years working for NHP in the electrical industry doing automation stuff, safety stuff, hazardous area stuff. Around about 2016, I got given the task of figuring out what the next big thing is going to be, so that we can get a piece of it. Took a bit of a look around and said the next big thing is probably going to be EV for an organisation that's largely into power distribution. Spent a few years at NHP leading the EV work there, and then got the tap on the shoulder to come join the Electric Vehicle Council and do a lot of the same sorts of things I was doing at NHP, but for the whole industry rather than just one employer.
Speaker 2:Okay and give us a sense of the timeline, because for a lot of people, evs only came into their communities five years ago. Perhaps for the average consumer two or three years ago, how long have you been thinking about this stuff around? The Australia Victorian Governance EV trial was made in 2014. That was really really long days in the Australian context, but in 2016, evs were actually there. We're talking about a lot of Tesla, a lot of Simplex, getting about a couple of them. We had some share handles that were featured in 2014.
Speaker 1:Nissan League was around, but the number of EVs on the road was measured in hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, which is what our audience might be worth. Just touching a little bit on the Electric Vehicle Council on this podcast this moment in Washington, and, of course, the founding members of the ABC. Tell us a little bit about how you see ABC's role in Australia and this transition and what you focus on in that.
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. So the UBC is an industry people. We're comprised of members across the transport and energy and related sectors. So we've got members who are vehicle manufacturers, people who are electrical equipment manufacturers, energy networks, energy retailers, installers, car rental companies, all sorts of organizations that look at a future involving electrified transport and believe that they have a role to play. It's not just limited to the obvious ones. So we've got members like Stryker, for example, who sell defibrillation equipment. Their interest in it is in a future where automotive workshops are doing work on 400 and 800 volt batteries. Those workers might benefit from the existence of a defibrillator on the wall. So there's a few that are involved where there's a reason for them to be there, but it's not necessarily immediately obvious.
Speaker 3:The sort of work we do. Three main legs to the EVC's work. There's policy and advocacy, where we work hand in glove with government, working on legislation, working on policy, making sure that at a federal and state level and even local level, we're all pulling in the right direction. There's industry development work, which is a lot of what I do. That's technical standards, codes. How do we do the nuts and bolts of getting the future to work?
Speaker 3:That involves things like updates to the building code, making sure that when we're putting up new apartments they're wired EV ready. It includes things like four, triple seven, making sure that the inverter standard is going to support v2g. It includes things like the rewrite of the wiring rules, as3000 that's coming up for work next year. And then there's the easy and fun part of my job, which is introducing people to each other. The nature of the industry is that no individual player can do it alone. We need the auto manufacturers and the charge point operators and the hardware manufacturers. Everybody's going to have to work together in order to get an outcome where consumers find it easy to switch to an EV. So facilitating that, running networking events, running working groups, doing simple introductions big part of what we do over here.
Speaker 2:And I think it's probably fair to say that, for most people listening, if they are EV enthusiasts thinking about purchasing their first EV, if they are installers or work in the industry, they have been directly affected by the work that the Electric Vehicle Council has done. They've probably seen your infographics, maybe without realising who put it together. They've engaged with policy that was helped, you know, being shaped by the EVC. So I think it's hard to understate the effect that the EVC has had on the industry, even if people don't really know, or haven't known prior to this conversation, exactly what you're out there doing in the space.
Speaker 3:Well. Thank you, that's a wonderful compliment, much appreciated. Yes, we strive to make a difference. The mission is to accelerate the uptake of EVs in Australia. We have certainly seen an acceleration of the uptake of EVs in Australia. We would certainly, of course, not take all the credit. We've done our bit. The organisations that are our members are the boots on the ground doing the work bringing in the cars, installing the stuff, making the stuff. Our role is to help to ensure that they're doing that in a policy-friendly environment, to ensure that the regulations and rules are match fit and to help them meet each other when they need to collaborate.
Speaker 1:Great Ross. So one of the reasons we brought you here is to tackle one of the more difficult problems in the EV transition, which is getting electric vehicle charging infrastructure into residential apartment buildings. So, just to set the scene a little bit, 10.5% of Aussies live in apartment buildings. That's 2.6 million of us and there's approximately 1.2 million apartment dwellings in Australia. So a pretty staggering number of electric vehicle charges that we expect to go in are going to need to go into this sector, and it's proven to be one of the more difficult areas to enable EV charging for a whole variety of reasons.
Speaker 1:So, to set the scene a little bit, I think it's helpful just to step through what a typical pathway would look like for apartment building to install this infrastructure, and it typically starts with an owner buying an EV or considering the purchase of an EV. They start rattling on the cage of the strata manager and the strata committee saying how do I charge my electric vehicle? And that triggers a whole bunch of questions where there's no easy answer in terms of what are the options, what needs to be done to enable this person to charge their Tesla and you know the rest of the owners to be able to charge the electric vehicles in the future. So usually a feasibility study is conducted at that stage, which is something that SolarJoyce has completed across most of the states in Australia, which is something that Solid Joyce has completed across most of the states in Australia, and that then leads into the next steps, which often look like the committee picking one option that they think is most suited to their owners and going through the process to get that approved.
Speaker 1:And the approval process can be one of the more challenging steps, as for many projects in Strata. So people probably aren't too unfamiliar that it's well known as a difficult area to get projects done because it needs to go to an all-owner vote. The voting thresholds in New South Wales, for example, is a 50% vote for these projects, but it's a 75% vote in Queensland and Victoria and the other states in Australia sort of sit somewhere in between. And in the process of getting those votes you start to get the objectors. Sometimes there's people in these buildings with their own agendas, buildings with their own agendas. We've, you know, seen this so many times play out where one owner will, will call out those concerns around fire insurance, different things to try and derail the project.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they're legitimate concerns, sometimes they've got their own agenda and they don't want to go down the path of electric vehicles and sometimes their concerns are based on misinformation that they've picked up somewhere along the way, when they've been trying to, in good faith, educate themselves, which is a real problem in the industry as well.
Speaker 4:And so if someone's lucky enough to get through all of those steps, and sometimes their concerns are based on misinformation that they've picked up somewhere along the way when they've been trying to, in good faith, educate themselves. Their concerns are based on disinformation. Finally, they need to find an electrical contractor that's got experience and can install this job well and with the reality of all of those steps being so difficult.
Speaker 1:There's very few electrical contractors with the right sort of experience to quote these jobs accurately, to deliver them without disruption. So it's a very complex area but a very crucial one that we're going to need to get right in Australia to enable this EV transition. So I mean, is that an accurate overview from your perspective, ross? I mean these projects can take many shapes, but, yeah, anything you would add to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, well, look, I'll start at the top. Yes, it is a tricky area If you're thinking about a person who owns an EV and wants to be able to charge it at home. If they are in the three quarters of the population that live in a standalone house with a driveway or a garage, whether they're owning or renting, their pathway is pretty straightforward, right. They'll likely already have a 10-hour power point in the garage they can use or they can install an EV charger.
Speaker 3:The apartment complex is a challenge because of the common property angle. You've got an environment where you have your parking space perhaps not physically connected to your dwelling, and it's just not easy to run electricity from your dwelling metre supply to your car parking space. That's not always the case. Not all strata is identical. If we're talking about strata, that's five or six units like flats that are sitting on a property that used to be a house and your carport is right next to your unit. In that setting, ev charging is not much different to a standalone home. So some of those million plus dwellings will be straightforward to execute, but others are going to look more like. My apartment is on the 15th floor, my allocated parking space is on the third basement floor and there is no way to run an extension lead from floor 15 to floor minus three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that sort of leads into another problem, which is a lot of owners don't sort of understand this common property challenge and whether there's power supply constraints to the building. And we've commonly come across buildings where they have decided to let the first one or two owners put in a cable and connect a wall box charger in their own parking bay. But the potential problem in the future that not everyone is going to be able to do that without subsequently, in five or 10 years, overloading the power supply to the building. So it sort of delivers a first mover advantage. These people who can get these charges in before triggering any power supplies will have their infrastructure. And then the later adopters come along and say, well, they've got one, I would like one, and and maybe the power supply is not there yet. So there are solutions to that with load management, but it requires an understanding and a plan executed by the building at the outset, without sort of going down these piecemeal problems.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think that there's an important piece there where the average EV driver is neither an electrician nor an engineer. So we should not be assuming that the driver, or indeed the people on the owners' committee, who are average citizens like the rest of us, are not necessarily going to have the full technical understanding. They're going to need assistance in that domain from consultants, from expert contractors, from folks like yourselves, to help work through that challenge. The piece about first mover advantage.
Speaker 3:If you think about an old apartment building, so one built some time back when air conditioning was not a thing and when the supply of heating energy for heating the building and also for heating the water was gas, the electrical supply to that building is likely to be pretty slim. So if the residents of that building all want to install induction cooktops or all want to install air conditioners, that's going to promote the same kinds of challenges as the residents of that building or wanting to buy EVs. It is almost always going to be the case that there is some spare capacity in the building in the middle of the night without an electrical upgrade. How much spare capacity there is is going to vary. Building by building A new building built with the assumption that every home has a split system, there's going to be plenty of capacity there for charging EVs off-peak. It's just about scheduling. An old building may not be the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the design Didn't take this into consideration. Through our feasibility studies, we've probably put data loggers on close to 100 residential apartment buildings now and can't say that there's any real pattern or consistency around the power supply available to the number of apartments. It seems to be like in certain states there's no pattern. It's purely case by case to see what sort of capacity is left.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and a good example, which actually contradicts what you just said, ross, which is a building that we're currently working with which is a three or four-year-old site pretty luxury apartments in a Sydney area where you know they would be designing that building. They should have been designing that building with these types of problems in mind and they've got slim to no spare electrical capacity and even though it's only a three year old building, they have no power going anywhere near the basement car park. So there's also an element of luck of the draw with apartment buildings as well.
Speaker 3:So to give some context on that, I live in a reasonably large standalone house. I've got 63 amps three-phase to my house. The supply to these apartments was 100 amps three-phase split across 20 homes and it's enough right up until you're installing any significant electrical kit and then it's not enough anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, once you start lifting the doors to these switchboards in residential apartment buildings, you find some very strange setups. Yeah, it just seems like there's no rhyme or reason to it. But, ross, there is a whole range of solutions for retrofitting EVSE into apartment buildings, I think you know. Perhaps one of the misconceptions is EV charging is a wall box, it requires a lot of cabling, it's going to be potentially a multiple hundred thousand dollar project and there is actually a range of different ways in which owners can charge their cars and doesn't always lead to such a huge price tag. So what are the different ways that could look?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so I'd say there is some good independent advice from New South Wales government in particular on this one. New South Wales government are running a grants program at the moment for EV ready buildings. But before they kicked off the grants program they did a pile of work with us and with Owners Corporation to produce some really useful guidance as to the variety of ways this challenge can be tackled. Pathways forward for an apartment building varies widely depending on the building. We were talking about simple strata before. So flats of small number where you've got a carport In that setting a power point or a seven kilowatt wall box on the side of the house in the carport area can work.
Speaker 3:In a bigger building you might start with a shared charger in a visitor's car parking area as an interim step to working out what to do next, because there's a means to make some movement forward.
Speaker 3:That isn't going to sustain forever because if you've got 100 cars parking in that building the long term doesn't look like all those people sharing one facility, but it can get you started on the journey.
Speaker 3:And the other point you made around first mover advantage there will be buildings where there is sufficient capacity in terms of the infrastructure and the network connection to let some percentage of the people move without it costing a fortune.
Speaker 3:So, depending on how the owner's corporation wants to tackle it, one reasonable strategy is to say we're going to design a solution here as a modular approach, as an interim step that'll solve for the first 15 or 20% of people, right, and we're going to do that reasonably cheaply. And here's how and here's the by bylaws. And then once we get to 20% of the people having EVs, we know that that solution is going to be tapped out. It's not going to work past that point, but we'll deal with that in five or ten years when we get to that point. And once you get to that point, succeeding in that 50% or 75% vote in the owners corporation becomes a bit easier, because at that point you've got 20% of the residents of the building owning EVs and maybe 50% thinking, yeah, an EV is going to be my next car. We do actually need to fix this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just to provide some colour at the very sort of simple and cheap end of the spectrum to put a powerpoint into parking bays, depending on how the building's set up, of course. We've seen quotes as low as four thousand dollars to set up a car park for eight parking bays. So obviously there's a lot of high rises and much bigger buildings but there's a huge amount of, you know, 10 apartment walk-up department buildings dotted around sydney and melbourne and brisbane that aren't necessarily looking at a hundred thousand dollars to enable EV charging. It could be a pretty simple project putting a PowerPoint into everyone's parking bay, and we've seen, as the votes have been conducted on some of these projects, that PowerPoint is actually attractive for non-EV owners because then they can vacuum their car or plug a fridge into their parking bay or do something else with that PowerPoint as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'll be clear. This is not a silver bullet kind of a problem. It is a buckshot kind of a problem. There are lots and lots of ways to peel this particular vegetable, the PowerPoint in the common car parking area. The only note I would say there is if the PowerPoint's being fed by common property power, then there's got to be a way to make sure that the person charging their car is paying their way. Otherwise you'll run very, very quickly into perfectly reasonable fairness considerations. There's lots and lots of ways to do that. Plenty of products out there, plenty of methods to do it. Not saying it's a problem, it's just something that needs to be front of mind, because otherwise what you'll get is those individuals who are perhaps unfriendly to EVs generally will quite reasonably latch onto it and say why am I, as a resident, paying for that person to charge their car? I wouldn't contribute to their petrol bill.
Speaker 1:I think that's triggered a lot of the feasibility studies we've completed has been the existing early adopters of EVs plugging into the car wash bay or a spare common area power point that's available in the car park already and triggering that sort of discomfort amongst the other owners that are effectively chipping in for for this person to charge their EV. I remember about six or seven years ago when I was driving an EV around Sydney. I lived in a couple of apartment buildings that I rented at the time. One of them, I ended up throwing an extension cord off the third story balcony to do an emergency charge when I had gotten too low. There was definitely a few times when I had gotten too low. There was definitely a few times when I drove the car into the car wash bay at 8pm and snuck it out again at 5am in the morning before anyone had noticed.
Speaker 1:But if there was any other option for me to pay and charge my own bay, I would have happily done it. But these types of guerrilla charging that people are forced into to enable them to have an EV. So it's sort of fair to say that one way or another every apartment building in Australia will have to solve this problem, whether it's in the next two years, the next five years, the next 15 years. It's unrealistic to think that apartment owners will all be using public infrastructure to charge their car right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So look what I would observe there is that individual buildings will make their own choices. It may be the case that some buildings, for whatever reason, choose not to support EV charging within the building. It is ultimately a choice for the owners in the building to make. The observation that we'd make there is that if the building doesn't support any EV charging at all, then the people who do switch to EVs to your point will need to charge their car somewhere else. That'll mean off the property, it'll mean less convenient, it'll probably mean slightly more expensive, but the real impact on the owners of that building will be property prices.
Speaker 3:Because if someone is considering an apartment they want to buy and they're thinking they might own an EV, one of the things they're really going to want to be able to do is charge their car in their allocated parking space. If someone's renting an apartment and they own an EV and renting in apartments is very, very common, right. So overall in this country about one third of people rent, but in apartments the renter population is much, much higher If you're owning an EV and renting the place you live, you absolutely will want to be able to charge that car in your allocated parking space. An apartment complex that doesn't enable it will see reduced property value and the owners will see reduced rental yield. So that's kind of the that's the fundamental piece that's going to drive it. It's the desire amongst the people who own the property to have that property retain value and to be able to collect a sensible amount of rent. Vast majority of buildings will follow the money and follow the resident's wishes and support it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's something that probably every year for the next 10 years is gonna be felt more and more by apartment owners. We find ourselves talking to clients about what you've just been saying there and saying, look, this is something that's going to affect property values. It's going to affect how much you can charge to a renter soon and it's also going to affect the resale value. But I think for a lot of property owners right now that still feels a bit theoretical because they're not feeling the impact of that. If they're not selling their apartment or relisting it in the next six months, they're not really sure that that's going to affect them. But as we move from the early adopters to the early majority phase with EV uptake, there's going to be more and more people moving into apartments, either because they purchased them or moving as a renter, where they'll be moving with an EV already in tow, and that question will become very real for apartment owners.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and really it's just a question of how long does it take for EVs to become large enough in quantity that they move that particular needle? It took a very long time to get to 1% of the on-road fleet being electric. It took a very, very small amount of time comparatively to reach 2% of the on-road fleet is electric. That's roughly where we're at today, reaching 3% or 4%. Maybe 12 months it'll take us to reach 3% or 4% of the vehicles on road being electric by 2030, it'll be somewhere on the order of 10% to 15%, and once 10% to 15% of your potential target market is shopping for a specific feature, if you can't offer it, that will have a meaningful impact. So yeah, to your point. For a lot of apartment owners, that financial matter has not yet been keenly felt, but it is coming very, very fast and the ones that are switched on know it's coming and they're taking steps accordingly so, ross, these projects say they build up.
Speaker 1:You know the Strata Committee is often doing a lot of research. They're going through the feasibility, they're getting the options, maybe getting some quotes. It all leads to a climactic point, which is the vote. So they, you know, put a motion forward at an AGM or maybe they conduct a special meeting to try and get this project approved to enable EV charging in their basement. And that's when often in our experience you've seen some of these objectors come out of the woodworks. They they receive some information about the project for the first time. They go hang on, this is 50 grand. I've just bought a, you know, maybe they've just bought a brand new range rover petrol or maybe they've got some other reason to object against the project.
Speaker 1:And you see both rational and, in a lot of cases, very irrational objections against the project. And often one of the hot spots for that is is fire. So people are concerned about the fire risk of evs. I mean that's broadly, as we, as we know, a misconception around evs in general being a fire risk. But the introduction of charging an electric vehicle in a a car park, um is, is broadly something that the average punter doesn't really know if that is a risk or not. But there's enough. There's enough noise out there to to generate a bit of a stir. So what? What do people need to understand about five risks of charging an EV?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. So I say yes. There is absolutely a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt being spread by many parties with respect to EVs. This is not surprising. The scale of the transition to EVs is huge. As a country, we spend about $50 billion a year on new cars. We also spend about $50 billion a year on petrol and diesel for those cars. Changing that $100 billion per annum spend is going to cause lots and lots of impact to lots and lots of stakeholders. So it's not surprising that there's money behind the campaign to say maybe we should slow this down.
Speaker 3:In terms of the perceived risk, the data relating to EV fires is really, really clear. Evs are far less likely to burn than petrol or diesel cars. In the handful of instances in Australia where the battery in an EV has gone up and when I say handful, like seven instances when the battery in an EV has gone up on a fleet of 300,000 vehicles there has been massive external influence. The things that have caused those fires have been high speed car crash, arson, the vehicle being disassembled by someone who doesn't know what they're doing and then being left in the rain. That's the kind of thing that has caused the fires. And when the fires have happened. They've been put out by our brave firefighters using water and foam. The same way, generally they tackle car fires. For context, fire Rescue New South Wales rolls out to about seven vehicle fires every day. Vehicle fires are very, very common. They're not news. They just make the news when they're electric cars Seven every day.
Speaker 2:that's probably gonna surprise a lot of people.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So two and a half thousand incidences a year, more or less, is what fires in Wales roll out to in vehicle fires. That's information in their annual report. Ev fires, by comparison, very, very rare, but it is new and it is different, and new and different can cause people to worry. This is why we go to the data on these matters. New South Wales Parliament did some work relatively recently. The Stay Safe Committee did a piece of work after two unrelated incidents in New South Wales, so there's some public information there.
Speaker 3:The other thing that we'd give guidance on is for a building. Really, it's the insurer that needs to be contacted. If you're doing retrofit work of EV charging in a building, that is fundamentally electrical work and it's regulated as electrical work. So you get a contractor to do it. They do all the safe things, they do all the paperwork and that's what the regulatory side looks like. If your insurer is comfortable with putting EV charging in the basement, then that really should be enough for the owner's corporation. The guidance we'd give there is, if your insurer is reading the fear, uncertainty and doubt and has problems or has concerns, that's a trigger to call your broker and find a different insurer to talk to.
Speaker 1:And so just looping back to the fire for a second. So if you put yourself in the shoes of a Strata committee member who's putting together this project to take to a motion, what regulations will the solution need to comply with? Are there any regulations specific to electric vehicle charging or electric vehicles in car parks?
Speaker 3:So electric vehicle charging is electrical work, so you absolutely have to have a licensed electrician do the installation work. Ultimately, in terms of regulatory compliance, if you want to install EV charging in a building, you can call an electrician and the electrician can install the equipment. This is the basic regulatory reality today.
Speaker 1:And is there any need to engage with a fire engineer?
Speaker 3:So often is going to be asked, and again this is because of all the fear and doubt that is being spread. But in terms of a retrofit of electrical equipment to a building, generally speaking the answer is no. Generally, electrical work does not trigger the requirement for a fire engineer or a building inspector to be involved. This doesn't mean that building surveyors aren't agitating to change those rules in order to move the goalposts on that so that they should be involved, and there's some fairly obvious self-interest at play there. But the current state of play is that electrical work is electrical work Very, very different. If you're talking about a new building, if you're building a new structure or you're undertaking significant structural work, that is the kind of thing that does trigger building inspectors and consent processes with fire services. So a new building, very, very distinct from established in terms of the regulatory framework that bounds it.
Speaker 1:I think the challenge is that these projects are so tough to get over the line. You know that process we talked about earlier. We're talking about a year journey in a lot of cases to get from that initial EV owner all the way through the steps and the objections through to an AGM and get the right vote and actually conduct the project through to an AGM and get the right vote and actually conduct the project. We've seen obviously much shorter than that, but you know it's not uncommon for these projects to stretch out over multiple years. We've found it extremely tough in the strata sector to find electrical contractors that are actually interested in getting involved in an apartment building. I guess like a challenging area to find specialists right like we. We. I kind of see solar choice as one of the businesses that is foolish enough to have created a business model around Strata buildings and and providing services to Strata buildings in this way, because there are so many challenges there and there's so much more low-hanging fruit with EV charges in the commercial space and in your standalone houses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so look you point up a very, very sensible, reasonable argument there. The challenge for the electrical contractor is that if they are expending effort to progress, the possibility of an opportunity with no real certainty that it's actually going to turn into work being done and then being paid, that's a problem for their business. A project like this might require a week's worth of work from the electrical contractor, to quote up. So if the owner's corporation is looking for three or four different quotes in order to pick from and is not actually yet committed to, this is the thing we're going to do. Perfectly reasonable for the sensible electrical contractor to say, yeah, that's a week's worth of work I'm probably not going to get paid for. So how do we square that up?
Speaker 3:The cure to that really looks like the owner's corporation being cognizant of that challenge, that operational reality for the electrical contractor, and perhaps being willing to pay upfront for expert consulting advice. This is an area where, if the expectation of the owners corporation is that businesses will invest significant effort with limited certainty of a payday, that expectation is going to meet the market reality of those folks choosing to spend their time doing other things. So the guidance there is really one of before asking businesses to invest a pile of time in your project. Understand that they are businesses and that they are looking for some certainty. So it may be necessary to commit some money up front towards covering off the costs of feasibility and design.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's probably the path that we've seen most common from electrical contractors who actually do have experience down here. They know not to get burnt by the tire kickers, by putting a price tag on just getting started on the building and sort of why. We've seen these types of projects being referred to as the poisoned apple of EV charging, in that they look very attractive. They could be a $100,000 project. You could be engaged with this huge building. To come back and do more EV charges and work over the next 10 to 15 years Sounds great, right until you start getting stuck in the weeds of trying to actually get some of these projects over the line.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, this is the nature of navigating projects in the domain, right? It's not that EVs are completely unusual in this respect. Easy to imagine an apartment complex might be giving consideration to. We're looking at that gas boiler and we're thinking about changing it over to electric. What's that going to look like? And the same sort of process and thought is going to run to it. There's capital cost, there's expense. There's expense, there's disruption. The committee needs to be brought on board. This is a similar kind of challenge to parallel challenges in that regard, yeah, very much.
Speaker 2:so I thought maybe just to wrap up, we might step away from apartments just for a moment and get your views on what's to come, because you do spend a lot of time thinking about all sorts of EV charging problems, not just departments that we focused on today. What can people expect to see from the insights that you have, being a real industry insider, in 5, 10, 15 years? What is this industry going to look like for us in Australia?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I guess my observation is it's going to be awesome, right, the reason I'm in this industry it's going to be really, really fun to work in and we're going to do a lot of meaningful work. We've got about 300,000 EVs on the road towards the start of next year. I think we'll touch that threshold. We've just crossed over 100,000 sold this year. So the future is going to involve millions of EVs.
Speaker 3:That's going to be the dominant form of personal road transport, as opposed to it being petrol and diesel cars. That doesn't mean that EVs are going to be the only vehicles on the road. There'll be people driving around in Holden Commodores on club plates for a good long while yet, in the same way that we've seen people in Model T Fords driving around on club plates. So it's not to the exclusion of all else. It's going to become the dominant form of car. We're going to see EVs enter into the truck and bus sector in a big way. The transition of diesel buses for public transport to electric is already well underway and is only going to speed up. We're seeing supermarkets run electric trucks for local delivery. We'll see local governments running electric garbage trucks. If it's on wheels and it's on the road. It's going to move to electric over the next 15, 20 years.
Speaker 3:The other big thing that's coming is vehicle to grid, which I think you guys have talked about a little bit before. The scale of the batteries in the cars over time is going to be such that they are the biggest form of storage connected to the energy system. To wrap some numbers around this, we've got about 15 million cars in the country. If we had each of them exporting at about five kilowatts roughly the size of a typical single phase household solar inverter that combined export is more than double the peak demand in the entire energy system. So we can't actually have a future where all the cars export. We don't have that much demand in the system, even on the hottest of afternoons.
Speaker 3:V2g, done well, is how we can bring forward the closure of coal and gas-fired power plants, and that's the climate mission. That's the reason we're doing the transition to EVs. So you've got one half, which is let's stop burning petrol and diesel the climate mission. That's the reason we're doing the transition to EVs. So you've got one half, which is let's stop burning petrol and diesel, and the other half is fantastic. We can run these things on solar and wind.
Speaker 2:We no longer need to burn coal and gas there's a lot to be excited about, particularly for those of us who live and breathe renewables, but as time will go on, I think everyone's gonna really understand the scope of the opportunity and the impact it's going to have on everyday life, the environment, all the things that we love about living in Australia and inhabiting this planet.
Speaker 3:Completely agree and thank you for having me on the show.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for your time, ross, and we'll keep looking out for all the great work that you're doing at the EVC Cheers. Have a great day, thanks, ross.
Speaker 1:So that's it, and thanks for listening to this episode of the EV Charging Podcast Brought to you as always by Solar Choice, australia's only instant quote comparison service for solar EV chargers, heat pumps, batteries and air conditioning systems. We also provide independent consultation and tender management for clean energy projects in commercial and strata buildings, with over 17 years of experience. Find out more at solarchoicenetau and stay tuned for the next episode in two weeks.
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