Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Committees

Economy and Infrastructure Committee

Reference

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (11:54): I move:

That this house requires the Economy and Infrastructure Committee to inquire into, consider and report, by 27 March 2026, on how Victoria can best harmonise electric vehicles (EVs) with electricity supply and demand, including but not limited to:

(1) strategies to reduce EV charging during periods of peak demand on the grid and increase charging during periods of peak supply;

(2) whether public charging infrastructure is being installed at a sufficient rate in different parts of Victoria, including older suburbs where most people do not have access to off-street parking;

(3) the best role for electricity distribution businesses in rolling out EV charging infrastructure, and how distribution network tariffs should be set for EV chargers;

(4) strategies to facilitate the take-up of EV ownership, including the facilitation of bidirectional charging;

(5) whether old EV batteries could have a second life as household or community batteries after removal from vehicles;

(6) the barriers and opportunities to the manufacture, reconditioning and recycling of EV batteries, or other elements of the EV supply chain, in Victoria; and

(7) any other related matters the committee considers relevant.

This inquiry will consider a number of important issues facing Victoria as we reduce our emissions and shift to a cleaner and more efficient economy. Electric vehicles are an important technology for reducing Victoria’s carbon emissions, and this can actually be across multiple sectors, not just transport.

Transport is concerning because it is Victoria’s second-largest source of emissions, and rather than being reduced, these emissions keep growing year on year. As we have pointed out as Greens in this chamber many times before, the only hope Victoria has to fully cut those transport emissions is to take a multipronged approach. Giving people options to leave cars at home entirely is a big part of that. It includes improving our walking and cycling infrastructure and running our buses, trains and trams more often to give people safe, reliable and convenient ways to get around without a car.

But clearly Victoria also need to electrify our car fleet as quickly as we feasibly can – private, commercial and state vehicles – and there is a strong role for governments to play in making that change as smooth as possible.

Those who own or rent freestanding homes with their own driveway and carport can save huge amounts on petrol by charging their cars at home, but there are significant up-front costs associated with this, which can act as barriers to uptake. Those who rent or have a house with no off-street parking or perhaps live in an apartment with strata-controlled parking areas face additional challenges, so it is important that Victoria’s regulations and financial incentives are set up to make this change smoother for everyone.

Beyond transport, though, electric vehicles also have a huge and sector-changing potential to impact how quickly our electricity grid reaches net zero. The huge battery fleet available in electric vehicles and the huge individual size of EV batteries mean that they can actually absorb significant amounts of electricity, which can overall for grid function be a good or a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. The bad scenario would be when a majority of Victorians owned electric vehicles and were all to come home and charge them at exactly the same time – 6 pm on a weeknight, which is already a period of peak electricity demand – which would add a lot of demand at that peak time and could mean bringing more expensive and dirty coal and gas power online to cope with this peak, meaning higher emissions and higher prices. But the good news is if most electric vehicles are charged during the middle of the day when the sun is up, solar panels are pumping power into the grid and the demand is relatively low, cars plugged in at that time could help to absorb abundant solar energy, and then they would not be contributing to demand later in the day, during the evening power peak.

Just as this timeshifting when vehicles are charged can help to smooth demand, it could have a big impact on its own. We need to consider strategies that the government can implement to encourage charging at favourable times of the day. This might include things like electricity tariffs that incentivise charging at certain times. It might also include public charging infrastructure located where people’s cars would already be during the midday solar peak – perhaps chargers at workplaces, shopping centres, railway station car parks or commuter car parks. Is there enough of this public infrastructure, is it located where it needs to be and is it enough to support those households who do not have charging options at home? With the rollout of charging infrastructure, what is the role of government and what is the role of grid operators and other private companies in this space?

The impact of electric vehicles on the grid gets even bigger when we start factoring in two-way charging. Imagine if we filled our cars’ batteries to the brim at lunchtime with clean renewable energy and then gave that energy back to the grid at dinnertime. Imagine if, when everyone got home from work and switched on all their appliances to cook dinner and watch TV, that spike in demand was met with solar power stored in everyone’s cars.

More good news about EV batteries is that they are generally much larger than your typical home solar battery. EV batteries can range from 60 to 80 kilowatt hours, while home solar batteries typically range from 5 to 20 kilowatt hours. To give some context to those numbers, the 91,000 EVs purchased in Australia last year alone have a combined battery storage capacity larger than all the big batteries built or under construction in Victoria currently, so it is a huge amount of stored power that we could be accessing, whether that is through people reducing demand by powering their own homes or through people giving back directly to the grid.

Two-way charging means that cars can be used to absorb excess power in the middle of the day and power our homes or the wider grid at peak times, helping to flatten the curves of peak supply and peak demand, and again, this means cheaper electricity and lower emissions, but we know that there are barriers to overcome to realise this future. On top of all the barriers people face to one-way charging, like having their own driveway, two-way chargers are still a new and relatively expensive technology at this stage.

Business interrupted pursuant to sessional orders.