Go to BP’s annual report for 2023, for example, and you learn that it ended the year with 29,000 recharging points and made $15.2 billion in profit. Five pages on, you learn that BP also sells fossil fuels…
The minister said: “We must double down on charging. We must think about the needs of people without off-street parking, we must think about fast-tracking the release of funding to local communities to roll out a reliable network of public charge points.” I’m not sure that’s what is happening, though, or whether it should. I’ve not seen any efforts by local authorities to provide public charging and when I’ve asked about running a cable across a pavement to the Ford, I’ve received a distinctly chilly reply from my local council planning office. It’s also hard not to boggle at the ethical and dialectical gymnastics involved in simultaneously urging the splurging of council tax on providing EV charge posts for the 1.1 million electric cars on our roads, while also ending the universal winter fuel allowance to old folk.
The minister also echoed ChargeUK calls to go “further and faster” in the rollout of charging points and recognised the need to provide “a reliable, accessible and affordable EV charging network”.
So far, they’re not doing particularly well, even by their own measure. One recent study from charging specialist Konect and fuelling specialist Gilbarco Veeder-Root showed that the US, Europe and the UK are more than six times behind the number of plugs needed to meet growing EV demand by 2030.
Reliability? What reliability?
As for the reliability, in three months and more than 3,000 miles of electric driving, charging on the go, I’ve found more than 20 out-of-service chargers, I’ve had my vehicle locked inside fields while charging and also been locked irretrievably to a charger twice when the plug refused to let go, which requires an engineer to release you and hours out of your life – EV motoring means constantly apologising for being late.
And as well as being expensive, it’s also hard to claim costs back as no charging post provides a receipt so getting one is long-winded and confusing. And while the touch-and-charge card system is slowly being introduced, you still need to create accounts with several suppliers to access lower unit prices and get reasonable coverage.
When I called ChargeUK, its affable PR said there are no available figures for reliability, so how would the minister know if charging is getting more dependable?
And while the figures for available charging points seem to spiral upwards by the day, nailing down the actual numbers is tricky. Vicky Read, the new chief executive of ChargeUK, recently claimed there are 930,000 charge points in the UK today – home, work and public, which is close to one charger for every EV.
Yet according to Zap Map, at the end of August this year there were 68,273 electric vehicle charging points across the UK, across 35,230 locations. Admittedly it claims a year-on-year increase of 41 per cent in public devices, with 19,823 installed; so well done…
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