Alcohol retailer Dan Murphy’s has added another electric vehicle fast charger, with a new site located at Batemans Bay, NSW. The site features a single 50kW DC charger with dual CCS connectors.
The new charger is already listed on the charging site PlugShare, where we see the location is close to shopping and restrooms. This charger is part of the Evie Networks charging network, just in time for the Eater holidays.
The company says we should watch out for many more Dan Murphy’s locations to get charging as they electrify stores nationwide.
It is interesting that companies like Dan Murphy’s are adding charging infrastructure at a growing rate. Electric Vehicle charging is way outside the core business for companies like this, but are clearly keen to incentivise customers to shop at their store, over competitors.
Charging at a liquor store, or fast food outlet, is an interesting proposition, given the time at the store is typically only a few minutes, which raises the question, would you even bother connecting your EV to pick up a few km of range while grabbing drinks for Friday night?
At 50kW you would need to spend around 80 minutes to recharge a 60kW/h battery and considering many of the EVs on the market in Australia today feature much larger batteries, you may want to consider what other shopping needs to be done in the area.
At this point, you may be wondering why Dan Murphy’s and venues like this, don’t put in the faster 350kW chargers. The easy answer is cost, basically the fast the charger is, the more it costs both in the charger itself and also the electric infrastructure required to provide that power.
The charger is located at 51/53A Orient St, Batemans Bay NSW 2536, Australia. The cost to charge is currently priced at $0.45/kWh.
What’s interesting is that this site first got electric charging infrastructure back in April 2020, but it seems the old Tritium VEEFIL-RT DC Charger. As Australia continues to build out its electric vehicle charging infrastructure, most efforts are being invested in new locations, and replacing an existing charger with a new model is incredibly rare.
The new charger is the Tritium RTM DC Charger | 50kW. The primary differences between the two models are that the new version allows for the 2 connectors to be selected by the location, historically, many chargers offered CHadeMO and CCS2, while the vast majority of EVs on the market in Australia support the CCS2 connector, so moving to a dual-CCS2 connector is a wise choice (sorry Nissan Leaf owners).
The other important difference is the Dual DC Charging capability. This means the charger can supply power to both charging connectors at the same time, allowing two vehicles at once to charge, effectively doubling the charging capability at the site.
The upgrade comes at a great time, ahead of the long Easter weekend when a lot of families are likely to be travelling and with more EVs on the road than ever, peak loads on charging infrastructure will be tested again, as it was at Christmas.
For those wondering how green the energy is, a common question when we post about charging EVs is, charging from Dan’s will be powered by 100% renewable energy as announced by Evie Networks in March.
