An ultra fast EV charger that runs on its own solar and battery, rather than drawing straight from the grid, started operating in Cockburn, south of Perth, on Friday 7 August 2026. Because the grid connection is backup only, the site can keep charging cars through a blackout. According to The Driven, which reported the opening, it is the first charger of its kind in Australia to be fully funded and commissioned by a private individual for public use.
How the site is built
The charger is an eLumina DS400 with two dispensers and four cables. Behind it sits a 70kW rooftop solar array feeding a Sigenergy inverter and a 240kWh battery stack, plus a further 30kW of DC solar wired directly into the charger. The grid connection is 70kW and exists as a fallback. That is a very different design to a conventional DC fast charger, which typically needs a large and expensive grid upgrade before the first car ever plugs in.
- One car charging: up to 250kW
- Two cars: up to 180kW each
- Three cars: up to 120kW each
- Four cars: up to 90kW each
- Storage: 240kWh battery, charged by 70kW of rooftop solar
Why grid independence is the interesting part
Reliability, not raw speed, is the recurring complaint about public charging in Western Australia. Volunteers at the Tesla Owners Club WA have built a live tracker showing which chargers on the state's network are actually working at any given moment, which tells you most of what you need to know about the problem. A site that stores its own energy sidesteps two failure modes at once: it does not go down with the local grid, and it does not need the network to deliver a large peak load at the moment four cars turn up together.
Who built it, and why they did not wait
Owner Jon Edwards funded the project himself after running a smaller eLumina charger at his workshop in O'Connor for 16 months. He chose not to pursue government grants, on the basis that the approval process would slow the build down. The site was opened with Cockburn mayor Logan Howlett, federal MP and Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Josh Wilson, and WA Greens leader Brad Pettitt in attendance.
Edwards expects around 30 charging sessions a day and estimates the site could displace roughly 250,000 litres of diesel a year across Cockburn's light industrial area, which had a genuine gap in fast charging coverage.
Where it is
The charger is at 32 Poletti Rd, Cockburn, and is listed on the Chargefox network.
The WattsUp take
Australia's charging rollout keeps running into the same wall: getting enough grid capacity to a site is slow, expensive, and often the single reason a location never gets built. Pairing a charger with solar and a battery turns that problem into a smaller one. If this site performs the way its owner expects, the more interesting outcome is not the 250kW number, it is the template. Note that we have only one detailed account of this opening at time of writing, so treat the operating figures as the owner's own until the site has some months of public use behind it.