Electrification specialist Zenobē is looking to off-site charging to solve a key issue in electric vehicle infrastructure.

Electric infrastructure in Australia still has a long way to go – it’s one of the major factors, alongside cost and range anxiety, holding more businesses back from fully committing to making the switch.

Add this on top of our freight task being largely reliant on long haul trucking, an area which isn’t yet suited to electric vehicles, and the uptake is maybe not as significant as policymakers would have been anticipating when setting future decarbonisation goals in 2030 and beyond.

But despite this, there are still corners of the industry looking at how they can make the adoption of electric trucking viable for Australian businesses.

Global fleet electrification specialist Zenobē has looked to off-site charging as one solution for electric fleets that lack the infrastructure needed to operate efficiently.

It recently received a grant from federal government organisation the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to the tune of $8.5 million. This is being put towards establishing an ‘electric charging hub’ in Mascot, Sydney to be initially used by Woolworths to charge its electric vehicles.

It will contain 22 dual-port DC fast chargers all equipped with smart charging software to optimise energy use while also using stationary battery storage made from repurposed batteries from old electric vehicles.

The ARENA funded project will also support a fleet of 60 electric trucks leased to Woolworths and the site has been built with additional capacity for other users, creating a multi-user charging facility.

Zenobē is an expert in the battery business, being the largest owner and operator of battery storage in the United Kingdom and supporting over 2,000 battery electric vehicles globally.

But right now in Australia and New Zealand, they’re working to upgrade and create new electric infrastructure for heavy commercial vehicles, having already completed five electric bus depots in the region since 2020.

PowerTorque spoke to Zenobē’s Australia/New Zealand Director Gareth Ridge about the charging hub project and how it reflects on the changing landscape of electric infrastructure in the country.

“We had been speaking to a number of players in the market, truck fleet operators, fleet owners, and we also had very good dialog with ARENA thanks to the Leichhardt Next Generation bus depot project,” he explains.

“We know that trucking is prime for electrification, so we were trying to look at what some of the barriers are that we think we can solve through our financing and our ‘as a service’ business model.

“It’s very hard for the market to break that down on its own without some sort of funding support. We selected Woolworths because they were quite a motivated customer to work with.

“The industry identified to us that across a lot of industrial sites, they have space but not enough for all their commercial vehicles to be electrified. The other problem we saw in the sector is that most sites are short on grid capacity

“Even big companies like Woolworths may not have long-term leases in place, making it difficult to upgrade the grid connection to house the infrastructure. That’s what we saw as the challenges to try and overcome.”

The charging hub is currently under development approval process with the City of Sydney, with the preliminary works and designs already completed.

Across January and February Zenobē broke ground on the install works, with the aim to have the site live and operational by June 2025.