With countless Australians planning to make the switch to Electric Vehicles (EV), businesses are looking at ways to speed up the transition and to make money while doing so. Origin Energy is one such business with a new, very appealing offer. They will make it easier and cheaper for EV owners to charge their cars. The company plans to offer five hours of free electricity every day, but what is the catch?
The catch
Indeed, this is exciting—but there is a catch to Origin’s 360 EV Energy Plan. To get free EV charging, EV owners must subscribe to a weekly subscription for an EV via the energy supplier, starting at $244 per week, or pay $2,700 to install a smart charger on your property.
The free electricity is limited to a certain time. For qualified users, free EV charging is only free between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm.
Origin’s GM of e-mobility Chau Le said, “The reason why we’re limiting the availability of the plan to subscription and smart charging customers at the moment is just to really test that plan with a smaller cohort of customers so that we can learn and refine and take that learning to see how we would build a plan for the broader customer base.”
In February, the company had to backtrack following a test page on its website that accidently went live that offered five hours of free electricity.
An Origin spokesperson said that the test page was “accidentally pushed live to our website when it should remain in a private testing environment.”
Origin has plans to widen its scope once they get more accurate information regarding the usage patterns of EV owners. The company first wants to see how customers will respond to the EV energy plan price signal before expanding it.
The company has partnered with Audi to deliver better access to smart chargers and energy plan. However, details have yet to be confirmed, but Origin is already in talks with other vehicle manufacturers.
Le said, “We are also in conversations with other OEMs (manufacturers).”
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EV charging in AU will be better than ever
Aside from Origin’s goal, EV owners would be happy to know that there will be a significant change to the charging infrastructure across the country.
In Queensland, Ampol is working with the government to convert 30 service stations into EV hubs following Energy Queensland’s report regarding the growing number of EVs in only twelve months.
Whilst in NSW, the Perrottet government announced they would install 30,000 EV chargers across the state at train stations, commuter car parks, and ferry stops in the next three years.
Currently, NSW only has a thousand public chargers, but some places, such as Barclay Road and Emu Plains commuter carpark, would be among the first sites that will receive the charging infrastructure.
Jolt now offers 7kWh of free, fast charging per session to EV owners in Knox in Victoria, resulting from the new council partnership. These charging stations will be located in local shopping centres that will help people transition to EVs.
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