The planned rollout of electric-car recharging stations across the ACT will need to come with other incentives to encourage motorists to switch from petrol-driven vehicles, a German renewable energy expert says.
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Environment Minister Simon Corbell said this week the government was in talks with ActewAGL about the installation of public battery-recharging points across Canberra.
While details are scant about the plan to boost the number of charging stations, Mr Corbell said action would need to be taken to lower public and private transport's fossil-fuel dependence.
According to the territory's Electric Vehicle Council, there are five publicly available recharging stations and eight ports in the ACT, with another seven for the territory's fleet of government cars.
Increasing the number of recharging stations has helped encourage electric car uptake overseas, but Werner Tillmetz, of Germany's Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research, said other factors had to be considered.
Just as owners of petrol-powered vehicles "do not accept inconvenience" from a lack of petrol stations, a mass adoption of electric cars would not happen if there were few public places to recharge, he said.
"This is the general conclusion from experts and has been addressed in the German strategy on e-mobility," he said.
Centre research found some 740,000 electric cars were registered worldwide at the start of 2015, an increase of 320,000 since January 2014.
All but 40,000 of the cars were shared between the United States, Britain, Norway, The Netherlands, Japan, France, China and Germany.
The US had the greatest percentage increase in registrations and the largest overall number of electric cars, which Dr Tillmetz attributed to government incentives.
Government mandates and laws, such as California's requirement that vehicle companies produce a minimum percentage of zero-emission vehicles for sale in the state, had a greater impact on the take-up of electric cars, he said.
"The impact of government incentives is huge," Dr Tillmetz said.
"Germany, who has almost no incentives today, has very poor sales figures for e-cars, while Norway is just the opposite."
Registration has also risen slightly in France, partly due to electric-car sharing service Autolib' expanding in Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux.
The main incentives in the ACT now, as promoted by the Electric Vehicle Council, are benefiting from cheap electricity and avoiding higher-than-average petrol costs.
Dr Tillmetz said most electric cars would be ideal for a typical Canberran's commute, but could become problematic during travel to Sydney or the South Coast
"E-cars have the best economic benefit if you drive daily between 40 and 100 kilometres, but for longer distances battery e-cars become more inconvenient," he said.
"Tesla is good for up to 300 kilometres and fuel-cell vehicles have no restriction, like gasoline cars, if the fuel infrastructure is available."
