EV charging infrastructure and plug-in grant scheme given £1.9b investment

Chris Ottewell    on 26 November 2020

Sadly most restaurants wont have adequate charging facilities! You can't park outside most restaurants these days let alone park AND charge! Even the Tesla charging station near here often has cars waiting for a free point before they can even start charging. And visiting friends? If they have a charger - please can I charge my car so I can get home? Should you offer to pay or assume they will need charging when the visit you? A minefield!

Graham W5    on 27 November 2020

Clearly an EV is more convenient if you have off street parking as you just get home, plug the car in and you have a full charge the next day. About 36% of homes in UK do not however have off street parking. A number of councils are now putting charging points into lampposts in areas where there is little or no off street parking for use by residents.

The price of EVS is currently an issue: typically an EV is £10k dearer than an equivalent petrol car and whilst you can typically expect to save £100 per month on running costs and whilst over the life of the car EVS are cheaper clearly it takes a number of years to recover the higher initial cost. Cost is reducing, it is expected price parity will be achieved within the next few years and before 2030. There is also limited used EVS available, as new sales increase this so used availability will follow.

With commercial charging points the grid is upgraded as required so it does cause the power cuts. With domestic installations, there may be exceptions but usually no upgrade to the power supply is needed: you can have a smart charger installed which will modulate the supply to the charging point depending on other usage in the house.

In terms of public charge points it is supply and demand. As the number of EVS is increasing the number of public charge points is increasing.

In term so power supply it is estimated to need 20 additional megawatts of power would be needed- that’s the equivalent output a reasonably sized offshore wind farm if all cars are electric (which will take many years to reach). This assumes pricing will be used to encourage off peak charging, grid supply requirement is not based on average demand but on peak demand: most people already charge over night at off peak demand.

Apart for Climate change it is estimated 28,000 to 36,000 deaths a year in the UK are due to air pollution of which road traffic is the main contributor www.gov.uk/governme.... There is a strong public heath reason to reduce petrol and diesel usage.

I drive a range extended EV (has a petrol engine but I average 350 mpg as over 85% on my driving is on electric: my next car will be pure EV but 3 years ago the only EV with the range I needed was a Tesla model S nice but expensive and too big to fit on my garage: there are now plenty of EVS with a range over 200miles with more to come). The final thing I will say is that people seem so keen to hang onto petrol as if they are being offered a poor substitute, but for most people once you have driven and EV you would not want to go back to a petrol car, they are quiet, you don't have to keep going to petrol stations (I do fill up about once every 3 months), the torque is instant and it is cheap to run (It costs me about £30 per month in electricity as against my previous car which did 40mpg about £130 per month in petrol).