“What happens next:” EV charging roadmap to set out priorities for next phase of electric transition

Australia's Electric Vehicle Council will lead development of a national EV charging roadmap through to 2035, backed by $1.06 million in ARENA funding. The roadmap, due mid-2027, will map charging demand for passenger and heavy vehicles, identify bottlenecks, and coordinate investment across car makers, charge point operators, networks, and fleet operators. The EVC framed the exercise as necessary because EV adoption is accelerating and charging infrastructure must scale in step.

Where this fits

This touches directly on grid reliability and whole-system cost. Coordinating EV charging demand is essential, but the roadmap assumes the electricity grid can absorb that load without naming the firm generation required to do so. Australia is adding millions of EVs to a grid that is already weather-dependent; charging peaks will collide with low wind and solar output, forcing either demand management (inconvenient and expensive) or more gas firming (undermining emissions targets and extending fossil-fuel dependency). A charging roadmap that does not map against firm generation capacity and grid stability is planning only half the problem.

What it means

Without explicit coordination between EV charging strategy and firm dispatchable power, Australia risks building a charging network that cannot be reliably powered. The roadmap will identify where chargers are needed; it will not solve whether the electricity to run them exists at the moment demand peaks. That gap will be filled by gas, by demand destruction, or by underutilised chargers. A nuclear-powered grid would provide the firm generation base to charge vehicles at scale without gas; that option remains banned by law, leaving coordination between transport and energy planning incomplete by design.