New data shines light on state of EV public charger network

For many years, it has been claimed Australia has a severe shortage of public chargers for passenger electric vehicles (EVs).

This gloomy evaluation can be found in the search summaries of AI chatbots, in media articles and parliamentary submissions, and even in public reports from regulators .

But analysis of exclusive data obtained by the ABC broadly suggests the opposite: EV drivers rarely queue to charge for fast charging stations.

While some regional and remote parts of the country do not have enough chargers to handle peak holiday traffic, for almost every hour of the year, most of the hundreds of public fast charger sites around the country have an empty bay.

The data paints a picture of the rollout that is both more complicated than the popular narrative, and more encouraging.

Fast charger network is growing exponentially

Over the past eight years, a network of public EV fast chargers has spread around the country, clustering in cities and peppering the length of the highway that circumnavigates the continent.

Before: Public CCS2 fast charger sites in 2018. . After: compared to 2026. (Supplied: Carloop). .

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Before and after images

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Public CCS2 fast charger sites in 2018 / compared to 2026. (Supplied: Carloop)

There are broadly two kinds of EV chargers: AC and DC, also known as slow and fast chargers.

Slow (AC) chargers include everything from a standard power socket (maybe about 2 kilowatts of power output) to dedicated charger units (up to about 22kW of output).

The fastest slow chargers will take many hours to charge an EV, while fast (DC) chargers can do the same job in about half an hour.

The fastest publicly available DC chargers in Australia (400kW) are hundreds of times more powerful than a standard power socket.

Although different speeds of chargers serve important roles, the evidence from Australia and overseas shows EV uptake correlates most strongly with access to public fast chargers.

Put simply, EV drivers want to know they will not be stranded with an empty battery.

Thanks to the rollout, an EV can now travel the 5,000-kilometre crescent of seaboard from Ceduna in South Australia to Port Douglas in Queensland while never being more than 50km from a public fast charger.

This fast charger in Bunbury, Western Australia, is one of thousands installed since 2024.( Supplied: Unsplash ) In 2018, there were 55 fast charger sites nationwide.

Now, there are more than 1,500.

It is estimated more fast charger bays will be added in 2026 than had been installed in the decade to 2024. The network is growing exponentially.

But is it growing fast enough? Australia may need 40,000 more fast charger plugs in less than a decade to serve a national fleet of 5 million EVs.

Build the network too slowly and sites will become too congested.

But build it too fast and chargers will degrade as they sit idle, while their operators lose money.

Timing the rollout is sometimes called "riding the edge of utilisation".

How often are EV drivers queuing for fast chargers?

One way to track whether the charger network has kept pace with EV uptake is to analyse utilisation data to see how often EV drivers must queue to use a fast charger.

That is, for how many minutes of the day are almost all of the plugs at individual charger sites being used?

This data is not publicly available, so the ABC turned to Carloop, a company that manages utilisation data for the vast majority of the fast charger network.

Let us focus on fast chargers in major cities first.

The data shows most EV drivers almost never have to queue for a fast charger. The average time across all fast chargers sites in major cities when 90 per cent of bays at a site are in use amounts to a bit over half an hour a day.

"It's not terrible congestion," Richard Laxton, a data expert at Carloop said.

"If you rocked up, there's a reasonably good chance you're going to get a station immediately."

But in regional and remote areas, it is a different story.

For most of the year, sites are almost never congested.

By this measure, some regional areas have better EV charging infrastructure than the major cities.

"Pick a random day, I can guarantee you would not see congestion at any charging station along the route from Melbourne to Sydney," Mr Laxton said.

But on some public holidays, when EV drivers exit the cities, the regional network can suddenly come under severe strain.

The congestion spike during Easter saw long queues for chargers in crossroads towns and beside major highways.

The four-day Easter long weekend had the highest annual traffic between capital cities, Mr Laxton said.

"It was a situation where the volume of traffic, particularly on the Hume Highway, overloaded the chargers," he said.

The worst day of the year for public charging

The small town of Coolac has one of the few ultra-fast charger sites along the Hume, which is Australia's busiest highway.

A 350km drive from Sydney…