Feature
numbers game
Jack Carfrae examines the state of the UK’s public charging infrastructure and asks what needs to happen to make it truly viable.
Above: Figures make it clear the rise in public charge points is in no way commensurate with that of plug-in vehicle sales.
improved enough. T
It’s hard to cut through the noise – or roar – that is this topic, because of its omnipresence and the queue of experts, genuine or spurious, keen to impart their views or debunk others, so we thought we would start with some old favourite sources, to get a proper handle on where the country’s charging network is up to in relation to the number of plug-in cars. Charging app Zap Map, said there were 42,566 electric vehicle charging points across the UK, across 24,909 charging locations at the end of April – a 37% year-on-year increase. The network grew fourfold between 2016 and 2022 from 6,500 to more than 37,261 devices and the big three providers are Ubitricity, Pod Point, and BP Pulse.
The government’s Powering Up Britain strategy, announced on 30 March, promised to boost public charging facilities with a £350 million investment. It said it would be funded “in partnership with industry…
24 | June 2023 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
here is no question that the UK’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure has improved. There is also no question that it has not
and by our capital allowances reforms to boost investment with the introduction of full expensing for three years”.
Writing in the government’s accompanying Taking charge: the electric vehicle infrastructure strategy document, the secretary of state for transport said, “we expect around 300,000 public chargers as a minimum by 2030.” If the government is to meet that target, public charge points must increase by 605% and 257,434 units between Zap Map’s end-of-April figure and the end of the decade. That equates to 36,776 new chargers per year – an 86% year-on-year increase, every year, until 2030.
Year-to-date battery-electric car sales reached 96,755 units at the end of April, up 25.6% year-on-year with a market share of 15.4%. Though typically less reliant on the public charging network, plug-in hybrids were up 11.5% to 40,360 units and a market share of 6.4%. Collectively, that is 137,115 plug-in cars registered in the first four months of 2023, which dovetails from 368,617 registrations in 2022.
A good chunk of those – and the ones that
came before them – will no doubt have the safety net of home and workplace chargers, the cheapest and most effective routes to the fleet consultants’ favourite phrase ‘ABC – Always Be Charging’. However, the aforementioned figures will not inspire huge confidence in anyone who has to deviate from that format – say, with a long journey to an unfamiliar location – and less still those who lack home charging facilities.
The government’s own figures suggest around 40% of the UK’s 33 million cars are parked on the street, while research by Zap Map and Field Dynamics published in July 2022, claimed the percentage of households without the space to charge at their own property, but who live within five minutes’ walk of a public EV charger, had risen from 12% to 17% since 2020 – a 40% increase. In short, the rise in public charge points is in no way commensurate with that of plug-in vehicle sales. It is not uncommon to pull up at an overcrowded charging station today, and unless the government gets somewhere near its optimistic target, we could be in for queues reminiscent of petrol station fuel shortages
The
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