Context on government vision for the rapid chargepoint network in England
On 14 May the UK Office for Low Emission Vehicles announced that part of the March 2020 budget 500 million is to go into the EV charging infrastructure.
That is great news and hopefully meaningful results will come out of that, supposedly much of it will go into motorway chargers with 6 to 12 planned for each service station along the UK motorways which is a meaningful increase from the current 2 chargers present (if at all)
To give a bit of further context lets look at what we have so far in terms of service station chargers.
In 2015 Co-financed by the European Union’s TEN-T (Trans European Transport Network) programme and four EV manufacturers – (BMW, Nissan, Renault and Volkswagen) – and energy companies (EDF, E.ON, ESB and Verbund) the UK got 7.4 million euro to build 74 fast chargers.
That comes down to a cost of about 100k per charging point, Ecotricity managed the charging points for England, there is no word on who will be the “e-mobility operator” for the new ones, considering that the plan is to build 2500 new charging points with the new budget that’s 200k per charging point, twice the 2015 cost.
A few things changed since 2015, we currently have around 809 motorway chargers and around 100k registered EVs, that’s about 120 cars per charger (excluding plugin hybrids).
National Grid estimates 10 million EVs in 2030, put that together with the planned number of motorway rapid chargers and it comes down to about 3000 cars per charger, that’s 25 times more than what we enjoy now, so expect these chargers to be quite busy !