Aussie energy company offers 1-dollar-a-day plan to charge electric vehicles

One of Australia's leading energy companies has launched a new scheme to try to boost the use of electric vehicles in Australia by offering unlimited charging for 1 dollar a day.

AGL Energy has proposed the idea and will look to increase demand for electric cars by attempting to counter the high running costs of buying and operating the vehicles.

AGL Energy, the provider of gas, electricity and solar panels to more than 3.7 million Australian customers, is offering the innovative 365-dollars-a-year service to its electric car customers, under a new plan to be launched on Nov. 1.

Company CEO, Andy Vesey, announced the new scheme in his speech to the Australian Energy Week conference in Melbourne on Tuesday.

"For a dollar a day if you have an electric vehicle and you have a AGL smart meter and a charger you can get energy for that car for 1 dollar a day, as much as you like," Vesey told the conference.

The offer, which is not fully developed yet, will be available to all electric vehicles on the market, from the high-end Tesla Model S and BMW i3 to the more affordable Toyota Prius hybrid and Nissan Leaf.

AGL said the electricity supplied to the vehicles under the new scheme would be fully "carbon offset" to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions.

It is proposed that AGL will hook up electric vehicle customers to chargers they already have installed, or provide them with a charger. Electric vehicle chargers currently sell for just over 750 U.S. dollars.

Out of the 1.1 million cars sold in Australia last year, only 2,000 of those were electric cars, with the majority of those sales going to commercial buyers.

Vesey said AGL is looking to expand with a new range of services to add to the traditional electricity supply business.

"We continue to try to find new applications that customers want. We continue to try to build load," he said. Endit