It has been confirmed by the UK Government that it will provide £20million to local authorities to assist with the installation of new on-street EV chargers in the next two years.
It has been confirmed by the UK Government that it will provide £20million to local authorities to assist with the installation of new on-street EV chargers in the next two years.
This funding, which is double what was provided in 2020 and quadruple that of the year before, will be available to local authorities to pay for 75% of the installation of new on-street EV chargers.
According to a statement from the Department for Transport this increased funding will help to take the number of government supported on-street chargers up to 8,000. This will mean that it is doubling the figure of 4,000 that it has installed since 2017.
Edmund King, AA president, recently said: “Good progress is being made but in order to help current and future EV drivers, more charge points will need to be installed. For the 40% of households without designated off-street parking, finding a viable, cheap and simple-to-use solution is key.”
With the increases in the number of electric vehicles on the road and with this set to only increase in the coming years as more manufacturers shift their focus away from ICE cars as we get closer to 2030, the need for more widely available on-street charging is only going to increase. So whilst it is positive to see this increase in funding it is likely that it will need to increase further in the coming years to ensure that there is suitable infrastructure to make EVs more viable than they are already.
In 2020 the number of new EVs and hybrids registered accounted for over 10% of all newly registered cars, which was more than a three-fold increase on 2019. So it is clear that more and more of us are adopting EVs and Hybrids over more traditional ICE cars.
As mentioned we think that the need for on-street charging is going to increase, meaning that more and more will be required. But, there has already been a significant increase of 500% in the last few years, with there being a total of 18,265 in the UK as of July of 2020. However, it has been suggested that this significant rise is still lagging behind the requirements with charge points per EV reaching their lowest level of 0.28 during last year. This figure was down from 9 in 2018, which just goes to show how much the adoption of EVs has increased in a short amount of time.
This has led to calls for even more funding than has already been pledged by the government as it is predicted that the increase in new EV registrations that we’ve already witnessed will only continue to increase in the coming years. This means that the public charging infrastructure will need to make significant strides forwards to keep up and failure to do so may impact people’s desire to make the change to an EV.
It is exciting to see the rise of EVs and we are certainly still in the early adoption stages, but for things to continue and for the successful transition away from ICE cars we can see that there is definitely a need for more development of the infrastructure and charging technology as a whole.