elective.com — 2022-08-24
Land transportation
The British Government has selected nine local authorities to develop over a thousand charge points for electric cars. The new EV infrastructure will spring up in England, including Durham, Nottinghamshire, and Suffolk.
This latest funding comes through the £450m Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) fund the Government announced in March 2022. It is part of a larger budget of 1.6bn pounds to install 300,000 charge points by 2030.
The nine local authorities will receive £10m from the UK Government to build more than 1,000 new charging points. Another £9m will come from private funding and an additional £1.9m from the authorities. The sum is equivalent to about €26n
This “pilot fund”, as Westminster calls it since it is the first charge from the pot, benefits Barnett, Dorset, Durham, Kent, Midlands Connect, North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk and Warrington. These councils and regions will install public charging stations in the form of larger petrol station-style hubs or on-street chargers.
RAC head of roads policy Nicholas Lyes said that investing in streetside charging was “an absolute necessity”.
Decarbonisation Minister Trudy Harrison added that working closely with industry and local Government should make it “even easier for those without driveways to charge their electric vehicles and support the switch to cleaner travel.”
The statement did not disclose any industry partners.
The new LEVI fund builds on the On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme (ORCS), which has seen nearly 2,900 charge points installed so far, with funding provided for approaching 10,000 additional charge points in the future.
The Government added today that it again extended the scheme: “Following growing demand from local authorities, we’re also announcing a further £10m in funding which has been brought forward for this year, bringing this year’s ORCS funding to £30m to help maintain ongoing installations.”
The OCRS funding covers up to 75% of the cost of installation. British companies such as Connected Kerb have been most active in installations.