A major electricity supplier in New South Wales has found a solution to Australia’s shortage of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations, particularly for regional areas.
Essential Energy recently began trials on an innovative EV charger integrated into a Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) utility pole, combining sleek design and leveraging off existing infrastructure.
By using established electrical infrastructure, in conjunction with hollow FRP utility poles, the roll out of EV charging stations can happen very quickly, safely and cost effectively compared to creating standalone charging stations detached from an existing framework.
Spearheading the trial was Essential Energy’s Manager of Innovation, Brad Trethewey, Innovation Senior Analyst, Stuart Simpson and Principal Engineer – Innovation, Paddy Atkinson.
“During the first 14 weeks of the pole trial, we saw the total number of people using the charger at 57 which averaged out at around four per week,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“Sessions per week fluctuated across the weeks, but one thing we are happy to report is that we have seen a sustained usage of the charger across the trial period,” Mr Atkinson said.
“In terms of our charge sessions, we saw long duration charges of around 85 minutes, so people chose to turn up and charge for long chunks of time, which is nice to see,” he said.
“Our average charge rate came in at around 11 kW. The rate at which the charge is delivered from the charger in an AC setting is dependent on the inverter on board in the car and in most cases that maxes out at 11 kW.”
Pictured – EV charging sessions per week across 14 weeks.
Feedback from the trial has been overwhelmingly positive.
“We had 100% of survey respondents have an extremely positive response to this power pole charger with many comments around the sleekness and aesthetic appeal of it,” Stuart Simpson said.
“A lot of people found it really easy to use and most people said they would use this charger at least once a week,” Mr Simpson said.
“Feedback included it being easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, people really liking the concept although there is not enough of them around and liking the location of it,” he said.
“When Paddy and a couple of other staff attended the site, they spoke with the people working in the motel across the road and they reported that visiting guests were using the charger overnight during their stay.”
“They also noticed that there were some repeat people who came and used the charger that live in the community nearby.”
“We have definitely had a mix of different people using the charger and a lot of different use cases, but overall some really good feedback and some really positive responses.”
Pictured – Essential Energy staff with the EV charger in Kew, New South Wales.
Limited access to charging infrastructure remains a major barrier to EV adoption in regional areas.
“What we are seeing in the transition to EVs within Australia is that it is heavily dominated by the city centres, and the regional setting is seeing a far less uptake of EVs,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“One of the things we believe this is due to is inadequate provisioning of charge infrastructure,” Mr Atkinson said.
“So we are aiming to provide another option for EV owners to charge their vehicles, and we see this as a way of doing that while value stacking other functions together within an installation,” he said.
“The feedback we received from the initial street light charger trial showed an overwhelming response from participants who rated regional charging as either poor or terrible.”
“This feedback strongly reinforced and echoed the direction we aimed to take with this work.”
“We believe that if adequate infrastructure is provided, there is actually good benefit to the regional driver for a transition to an EV vehicle in that regional drivers typically drive a lot further than urban people do which can lead to increased fuel and carbon savings.”
Pictured – The ChargePost EV charger embedded in a Wagners FRP utility pole.
The utility pole design required careful collaboration between Essential Energy and Wagners to balance access needs with structural strength.
“We worked hand in hand with the professional team at Wagners to mock up the best option we had by way of a cutout for the pole,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“We needed a cutout which allowed us to access the internals of the pole. The design challenge with that is that the more material you remove, the more strength you reduce and the greater the tip deflection becomes,” Mr Atkinson said.
“We initially worked with Wagners to give them our desirable cutout size with an idea to future proof for other types of installation later on,” he said.
“There was a back and forth process to establish what was technically feasible against what we desired and in the end we arrived at a cutout size which is 500 millimetres long and 100 millimetres wide.”
“That allowed for the strength to be maintained and the tip deflection to be within the acceptable limits.”
Pictured – The pole design and an example cutout during the prototype stage.
Once the cutout size was finalised, the EV charger could be embedded in the FRP profile.
“The EV charger is a 22 kW three-phase ChargePost charger. It can charge up to 22 kW giving up to about 120 kilometres of range per hour depending on the vehicle and the restrictions of that vehicle,” Stuart Simpson said.
“It is fully market ready. We are using an off-the-shelf charger and a revenue grade meter that is fully enclosed behind the charger inside of the column and all the cabling is neatly concealed in the column,” Mr Simpson said.
“We are moving through to a fully composite transition of our utility poles and this is a solution that value stacks on that transition. We can use this existing asset for additional purposes such as integrating an EV charger inside of it,” he said.
“This was initially a three-month time-boxed trial and we worked with the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) to meet certain requirements around this trial.”
“The charger was free to use for the general public and there was a QR code where users were asked to fill out a survey and answer questions about their experience with the charger.”
Pictured – Cover plate prototype with the embedded EV charger.
Clean installation and easy maintenance were key priorities of the pole design.
“The charger and the cover plate are attached to one another, which makes for a fairly elegant installation,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“When we need to remove the charger, we remove two security screws, top and bottom, which allows us to take the entire installation out and lay it on a workbench next to the pole,” Mr Atkinson said.
“Internal to the pole, we worked with Wagners to get some backing to fix our internal equipment to,” he said.
“Wagners installed a bit of composite flat bar in the back of the pole that is epoxied to the inside which allows us to have a substrate to screw to.”
“On that backing plate we have been able to attach a market ready revenue grade three-phase meter as well as RCBO protection, which is the residual current device and a circuit breaker in one. This is our point of isolation if we need to do any work local to the meter or the charger itself.”
Pictured – The inside layout of the EV charger utility pole.
Safety and performance checks were carried out on the EV charger before use to guarantee safe operation.
“Being a low voltage electrical installation, we needed to do our testing and commissioning,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“We are governed by Australian standard AS3000 in this case which includes the mandatory tests that would be required for an LV installation of this kind including continuity, insulation resistance, polarity, earth folder impedance, remote earth neutral integrity and the operation of RCDs,” Mr Atkinson said.
“In addition to that, we did some EV charger specific tests which involved us determining the protection clearance for some of the safety functionality within the charger. We also simulated faults that could occur on the EV or on the charge cable itself,” he said.
“For example, if someone turned up with a cable with a broken internal wire, we were able to demonstrate that the charger would respond accordingly and make the installation safe in that instance.”
“Some of the other tests involved us confirming the comms for the charger and the meter were talking to their respective back office systems via the internet.”
“We also did load tests which helped us confirm that the measurement from the metering was what we were expecting to see, we provided a known load and compared it to the results we were seeing from the meter.”
Pictured – Testing and commissioning of the EV charger.
The EV charger connection used a standard low voltage setup with all wiring concealed inside the pole.
“In terms of our connection, we went with a fairly standardised approach within Essential Energy which involves a LV fuse link at the head of the pole,” Paddy Atkinson said.
“We are taking off from the LV conductors via a fuse link, then we are using single double cabling inside flexible conduit which passes into the pole at the head of the pole via a small hole,” Mr Atkinson said.
“It is sleeved at that point and then mechanically restrained by an eyebolt shackle arrangement to avoid abrasion on the cabling which is subject to its own weight hanging down within the pole,” he said.
“In terms of earthing, we have got an earth stake at the base of the pole and the earth wire is also passed into the pole so we are avoiding any cabling on the surface of the pole.”
“All the wiring is internal to the pole which adds to the sleekness of the design.”
Pictured – Connection arrangements for the EV charger.
Kew, New South Wales was chosen as the trial location.
“The site is just off the Pacific Highway, 30 minutes south of Port Macquarie in a small town called Kew,” Stuart Simpson said.
“There are only around 2,000 people in the general vicinity of that charger and looking at the stats, there are only about 17 EVs registered in the general area,” Mr Simpson said.
“We worked with the local council on where they would prefer to see chargers and we thought this would be a good solution, close to the highway but with a small population, to see what sort of customers we would see using the charger,” he said.
“We believe we chose a site with good parking. It is also located near local businesses that could see benefits from the charging.”
“It is also within 500 metres of a Tesla fast charging station that was recently commissioned around the same time as we kicked off this trial.”
Pictured – A map of the trial location being Kew, New South Wales.
Lessons from an earlier street light EV charger trial guided the development of this utility pole trial.
“This trial followed on from a four-week trial we did in Port Macquarie last year with a street light column,” Stuart Simpson said.
“It is a fully integrated EV charger prototype that we put inside of a column,” Mr Simpson said.
“It’s a 7 kW charger that charges at about 40km an hour or so. For an EV charger that comes along and plugs in, this was a really successful trial and we had extremely positive feedback,” he said.
“From this, we took the learnings of this trial and looked at what’s next. That’s when we decided to do a next iteration of this product, looking to put an EV charger inside of a distribution utility pole.”
Pictured – The composite street light EV charger trial that occurred in 2024.
Results highlight the continued gap in regional EV charging and the benefits of integrated solutions.
“As per the street light charger trial, this trial has validated the need for ubiquitous type 2 EV charging in the public arena,” Brad Trethewey said.
“Pleasingly or perhaps not so pleasingly, the survey results have aligned with the previous trial around the street light charger which has suggested that in regional areas, 60% of the people that have provided a survey response have indicated that the charging availability is poor or terrible,” Mr Trethewey said.
“We believe that these sort of solutions integrated into existing infrastructure provide a value stack outcome but also provide that service to regional New South Wales,” he said.
“As we look on to what we’re going to do next, we’re refining this particular design based on the trial learnings with Wagners and ChargePost in a similar fashion to what we did for the street light charger.”
“With the street light charger, it was at a technical readiness level of around three. We’ve lifted that technical readiness level with this particular trial up to a readiness level of around seven or eight.”
“So this particular installation can be deployed now in terms of the technical capability of it. It’s market facing, it’s got all the revenue requirements that are suitable.”
“Some minor technical issues that we are resolving will finally close the door on the technical aspects of this particular trial.”
Pictured – An Essential Energy EV plugged into the utility pole EV charger.
Essential Energy’s shift to composite infrastructure has evolved over decades, with further projects already in the works.
“Essential Energy has been using composite assets for quite some time. We started almost 20 years ago looking at composite crossarms and we went fully composite with our crossarm fleet in 2012,” Brad Trethewey said.
“The behaviour and the outcomes of those composite crossarms have been exceptional,” Mr Trethewey said.
“We’ve done a lot of accelerated testing and aging at our lab facility in Port Macquarie and we’ve been very happy with those,” he said.
“We started playing around with poles around about 2014 and we’re now transitioning fully to a composite pole fleet.”
“Realistically this is not the last thing you will hear from Essential Energy in terms of leveraging our composite asset transition.”
“We’ve done a street light charger trial, we’ve now done a pole charger trial.”
“There is another trial we are working on that will leverage the composite transition and I’d suggest watching this space.”
To watch the full webinar with Essential Energy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY_YtR2Bj8k&t=705s
To read about Essential Energy’s Plug and Play Program – https://www.essentialenergy.com.au/media-centre/media-release/News-10122025-kerbside-ev-charging
To read about the initial street light EV charger trial – https://www.wagnerscft.com.au/car-charger-trail-in-frp-light-pole-paves-way-for-national-rollout/
