The Government has opened a second round of zero interest loans for public electric vehicle chargers, with about $21 million on offer. On the figures it has published itself, the two rounds together will take New Zealand only about halfway to its target of 10,000 public charge points by 2030.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop and Energy Minister Simeon Brown announced the round on Saturday. National Infrastructure Funding and Financing, the Crown company that handles the money, will release a request for proposals on Monday 10 August. It is looking for charge point operators willing to co invest in portfolios of charging sites around the country. The loans carry no interest, can cover up to half of a project’s eligible capital costs and run for as long as 12 years.
The pitch is that private money will not move first. “It’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation. Companies are reluctant to invest in new charging infrastructure until there are more EVs on the road, while many people are hesitant to buy an EV until they know charging will be readily available,” Bishop said in the announcement.
He also set out the starting point. “Before this Government began addressing the issue, New Zealand had just over 1,800 public charge points – one of the lowest charger-to-EV ratios in the OECD,” Bishop said.
That 1,800 figure is the number worth holding on to, because it is what all the arithmetic hangs off. New Zealand has roughly 98,900 fully electric light vehicles on the road, plus about 49,600 plug in hybrids. Measured against battery electric cars alone, the existing network works out at one public charge point for every 55 of them. The Government’s 2030 goal of 10,000 chargers is pegged to a ratio of roughly one for every 40 electric vehicles, which quietly assumes the fleet will grow to around 400,000 vehicles inside four years. That is four times the current number of battery electric cars.
The first round of loans was announced in March and put $52.7 million into two operators. ChargeNet took $37.7 million for more than 1,700 charge points and Meridian Energy took $15 million for about 900. Both are matching the Crown money. The total came to 2,574 new charge points, all of them due by 2030 rather than next year, which Bishop said would “more than double New Zealand’s public charging network”.
Run the second round through the same maths and the gap becomes clear. Round one cost the Crown about $20,500 in loan money per charge point. At that rate, $21 million buys roughly another 1,000. Add them up and you get about 5,400 public charge points by 2030, against a target of 10,000. Something in the order of 4,600 charge points would still need to be found, either from operators funding themselves or from rounds the Government has not yet announced.
There is also the question of how fast any of this actually turns into hardware in the ground. In May the industry was still complaining that the programme had produced very little. The original request for proposals closed in July 2025 and drew only six compliant submissions. Evnex founder and chief executive Ed Harvey said at the time that the shift away from grants had “done huge damage to the industry” and that the Government’s “lack of strategy and ambition around electrification is nothing short of embarrassing”. The criticism industry figures have made repeatedly is that a zero interest loan shifts the business case for a charging site by only a percentage point or two, where the grants it replaced moved it by around 30 percent.
The Government’s answer is that round one proved the model works. “Round one demonstrated strong market demand for the programme and showed concessionary loans can successfully unlock significant private sector investment,” Bishop said.
Brown framed it as staying out of people’s way. “New Zealanders will make the best choices for their own circumstances, as we are seeing with the greater uptake of EVs without unnecessary subsidies from taxpayers,” he said. “With actions like loans for public EV chargers, the Government is helping provide the infrastructure and settings to broaden those choices.”
That is a fine line to walk. A 12 year loan at zero percent is not a grant, and the Crown expects the money back, but lending at no interest for that long is a real transfer of value from the taxpayer to the borrower. The Government has scrapped the purchase subsidies that went to EV buyers and replaced them with cheap capital for the companies building the chargers. Whether that counts as a subsidy is largely a question of where you choose to draw the line.
The timing is not accidental. Petrol has been sitting around $3.05 a litre for 91 octane, with 95 above $3.20, and pump prices have been high and jumpy for months as the Hormuz crisis has worked its way through global supply. Every month the pumps stay expensive is a month more drivers look at an electric car and then look at whether they could get one to Taupo and back. Charging on long trips outside the main centres is the complaint ministers keep citing, and it is the part of the network that costs the most to build for the least immediate use.
Applications will be assessed through an open procurement process, weighted towards value for money and towards how much each proposal adds to the national network. Cabinet has not said whether a third round will follow.
Transport and energy policy will be on the table at the general election on 7 November. If you want to see where the parties actually sit on this and everything else, our voting tool is a good place to start.
Do you have an electric car, or have you held off because of the charging network? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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