American electric vehicle manufacturer, Elon Musk’s Tesla’s electric vehicle sales are steadily rising up off a lowly base in the market of Australia, and are dead-set to capture up with the sales of its Powerwall home batteries in the country, Chair Robyn Denholm communicated on Tuesday. “We now have more than 26,500 Teslas on Australian roads, and the momentum is there,” Denholm said at the Australian Clean Energy Summit in Sydney. “I personally wouldn’t be surprised if we double that number by the end of the year,” she further added.
The Australian market is responsible for making up about 1 per cent of the Tesla electric vehicles sales and on the road, which in total made up a totalled 2.5 million globally at the end of the first quarter of 2022. Electric vehicles as of now only make up just 2% of new car sales in Australia. “Australia is in a very unique position from an energy perspective, in that we have more Powerwalls installed in Australia than we do have Teslas on the road,” Denholm also said.
The popularity of home batteries in Australia goes along with rooftop solar, in a country that has one of the highest per capita rooftop solar uptake globally. The current biggest obstacle in the more rapid uptake of electric vehicles is the lack of fast charging stations, Denholm said. “These chargers need to be rolled out without delay. This is the missing piece to mass EV adoption,” Denholm again said.
She also encouraged the new Labour government to put in the establishment of various vehicle fuel emission standards to encourage uptake of electric vehicles and spur upgrades on the grid crucial for charging stations and utility-scale energy storage. She also restated the calls for Australia to do more to build battery materials refining factories. Tesla sources three-quarters of the lithium it needs for its batteries from Australia, but the country hardly has any refining capacity for higher value material that goes into batteries.
