The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has announced investment of more than £380M in Electric Vehicle (EV) charging points and infrastructure across the country. The announcement1 outlines proposals to help the UK to meet its wider EV ambitions – to phase out the sale of petrol/diesel cars by 2030, supported by a network of around 300,000 charge points – and ultimately achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. To give this ambition some context, there are currently almost 30,000 of these chargepoints, at both on-street and private locations, and these serve around 750,000 plug-in vehicles.
The ambitious infrastructure target will not be met overnight and the Government’s ‘Taking Charge: the electric vehicle infrastructure strategy’2 describes how “commitment and investment” will be needed, “across the energy chargepoint, automotive, and public sectors”. This commitment, to be delivered by local authorities across the UK through a range of funding streams, can already be evidenced through Oxygen Finance’s Insights Pre-Procurement tool.
Oxygen Finance Insights, which gathers market intelligence for both private/public sector clients using Council papers, has highlighted more than 25 local authority opportunities for EV charge points and infrastructure in the first 3 months of 2023 alone. These pre-tender opportunities have been advertised across a large UK geographical spread too, from councils in the south-east (Brighton and Hove) and London (Lambeth, Merton, Camden and Barnet), and across the length of the UK up to northern Scotland (Highland Council, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire) and Edinburgh.
The EV charge point/infrastructure proposals will be delivered through a range of funding streams, including the EV Home-charging Scheme, the Workplace Charging Scheme, the On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme, the Local EV Infrastructure Fund, the Rapid Charging Fund and the Charging Infrastructure Investment Fund. Together, these financing avenues, alongside private sector investment, will help to install “tens of thousands” of new charging infrastructure and will prove to be “absolutely fundamental to delivering net zero road transport”.
As part of local authorities’ wider efforts to move to net-zero, many councils are also reviewing their EV provision within public transport. One north-west local authority, Warrington Borough Council, is transforming bus travel through the introduction of an all-electric bus fleet. A £21.5M Government grant, topped up with its own funding towards a total project cost of £50M, will be used to deliver more than 100 electric buses during 2024, replacing the Council’s whole fleet, and will be “the highest number of electric buses to be introduced by any town or city in the UK”. Ben Wakerley, Managing Director at Warrington’s Own Buses, said: “This is great news for Warrington. As well as the clear environmental benefits it will bring, the introduction of our electric fleet will dramatically improve the quality of our services, building on the slashed fares we have already introduced and improving reliability and punctuality.”3
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[1] ‘Shapps sets out plans to drive multi-billion-pound investment in energy revolution’., – 30th March 2023
[2] Taking charge: the electric vehicle infrastructure strategy.
[3] Green Light for Warrington’s Electric Buses.
