Electric dream

Ear­li­er this year I moved to Alice Springs to con­tin­ue my new role as Project Man­ag­er for the Intyal­heme Cen­tre for Future Ener­gy. Intyal­heme is lead­ing the Alice Springs Future Grid project on behalf of Desert Knowl­edge Aus­tralia (DKA). Future Grid involves a con­sor­tium of key ener­gy stake­hold­ers across the North­ern Ter­ri­to­ry, which are col­lab­o­rat­ing on a series of tri­als to remove bar­ri­ers to fur­ther renew­able ener­gy pen­e­tra­tion in the Alice Springs elec­tric­i­ty sys­tem. Ulti­mate­ly this process will inform the path­way to show how Alice Springs can achieve the NT tar­get of 50 per cent renew­able ener­gy by 2030.

Excit­ing­ly, Intyal­heme has a Nis­san Leaf, as part of the DKA fleet, which I’ve been able to use since. It’s also not the first elec­tric vehi­cle (EV) in Alice Springs, with Tes­las gain­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly notice­able fol­low­ing in the past few years.

I was keen to avoid devel­op­ing any sort of range anx­i­ety and so I set out to learn what the range was and where I would be able to charge the car. And impor­tant­ly, find­ing which sites I could reach, along the Mac­Don­nell Ranges. First up I found the EO Uni­ver­sal EV charg­er at Alice Springs Town Coun­cil to be excel­lent (close to the hotel where I was stay­ing, fast, and pow­ered by solar on the shade struc­tures over the carpark). The PlugShare web­site helped iden­ti­fy oth­er charg­ing loca­tions. In total there are 11 plugs of var­i­ous types in Alice Springs (cor­rect at the time of writing).

When not charg­ing at the Town Coun­cil I can also use an adapter for an ordi­nary sin­gle-phase house­hold con­nec­tion. Although slow­er to charge, hav­ing the car plugged in at work dur­ing the day will increase the avail­able range by at least 100km. Plen­ty, giv­en dri­ving between work at the Desert Knowl­edge Precinct and home is under 30km return. I choose to charge at the Precinct, because it is pow­ered by about 40% renew­able ener­gy from the DKA Solar Cen­tre. As the amount of renew­able ener­gy in the Alice Springs grid increas­es, the car’s emis­sions will decrease even further.

My first week­end in Alice Springs I was ready to hit the Ross High­way and the East Mac­Don­nell Ranges. The car was ful­ly charged – dis­play­ing 253km as my range. While using the air­con dropped this range to about 230km I fig­ured Trephi­na Gorge about 80km away, one-way, was a real pos­si­bil­i­ty. As it was an unusu­al­ly cool day at 23°C, I was able to use only the fan rather than the air­con; and set­ting the cruise con­trol to 100km per hour we reached the des­ti­na­tion eas­i­ly. I was even able to press on to reach the Ross Riv­er Resort, adding a fur­ther 25km to the total distance.

On the way back to town, the air­con was back on and the cruise con­trol set. Arriv­ing back in town with 12% ener­gy left in the bat­tery and 38km remain­ing range. In total I cov­ered 185km, and with the remain­ing 38km I now know I would feel com­fort­able tak­ing the ful­ly-charged car over 200km, which is excel­lent. Since this trip I’ve set­tled into a rou­tine of dri­ving the car between work, around town, here and there; plug­ging it in on either Wednes­day or Thurs­day, and real­ly not wor­ry­ing about it.

I have tak­en to the EV rou­tine quick­ly, I’m impressed with its per­for­mance, and I hope to see a strong future for elec­tric vehi­cles in Alice Springs.