The number of charging points is shrinking compared with the number of EVs coming onto UK roads. There’s now just one charger per 32 cars, compared with one for 16 cars in 2021, says the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

With the 2030 deadline looming for the end of sales of petrol and diesel cars, manufacturers are reporting a shift in buying habits towards EVs. The proportion of sales of EVs in the UK grew suddenly to 11.5% last year. But the infrastructure of charging points is increasingly lagging behind.

Central government policy is focused on the importance of home charging. It’s cheap and convenient (and there can be grants to help people living in flats or without a driveway). At the same time, there’s a recognition that public chargers, wherever we are when we leave home, have a bad reputation – in terms of both their availability and whether they’ll actually work when you most need them. ‘Charging anxiety’ is still with us, blocking the rate of growth and souring public perceptions.

Making the transition to a new national infrastructure is a classic chicken and egg situation – not worth the investment until there’s a critical mass of users. EVs, for the moment, make up just 2% of all vehicles on UK roads. 

The problem here is that we become stuck in old ways of thinking about the public as just consumers of energy. Even when EVs have become the norm, there is still going to be an imperative need for a different kind of infrastructure than we’re used to, not one solely based on consumers pulling into energy stations. One that involves sharing and not just consumption.

Mobility as a service

The EV situation is an example of the importance of mobility innovations such as the ‘Mobility as a Service’ (MaaS) approach. Data analysis and modelling allows for the different stakeholders – in this case, local authorities, energy providers (DNOs, the distributed network operators) and transport users – to work together more efficiently and offer new kinds of business models which make more sense to EV users and for supporting environmental policies.

In this context, a MaaS approach would use data on real-world demand, the where and when. Cranfield research is already setting out how this can be made possible – how anonymised mobile phone data can be used to see who’s going where, distances travelled and locations where cars are actually being left, and for how long. 

This in turn produces a picture of the opportunities for charging, as well as opportunities for EVs to feed in their excess charge into the system for others to use, and to act as batteries for downloading charge from local solar power generation.

For energy companies that means the ability to incentivise EV users and influence behaviours and types of usage – how they interact with the system and call on electricity supplies. Energy companies can provide discounts for charging at lower-demand times or in particular places; they can also offer pay-back schemes for EV users who are giving back their unneeded battery charge. A simple smartphone app will be able to do all the work, setting out the best, most cost-effective and sustainable options.

In this way, personal mobility and car driving become something more conscious and active, empowering consumers and facilitating their transition into ‘prosumers’ – those who are part of a community of electricity users and sharers, not just straight consumers. More aware of the value of electricity as a commodity.

Public/private partnerships

MaaS is still at the pilot stage via different packages of research and pilot schemes around the UK. Our work on modelling and algorithms for incentivising EV users is expected to lead to actionable insights in 2023. 

But early evidence suggests that these kinds of data-enhanced transport initiatives will be best run through a partnership between the public and private sectors. Bodies like local authorities can set the ground rules to ensure a focus on sustainability and good social impact, outsourcing the work to private providers like the DNOs to deliver. 

MaaS can help act as a stimulus for more strategic local authority involvement, moving them on from only thinking in terms of providing back-up, filling in the gaps of needs for charging points (for residents without off-street parking, or who need access to chargers for work etc).

Making the transition to EVs is going to mean more than a change in decisions over which cars to purchase, it means a massive shift in everyday behaviours. And that means a real chance to re-shape attitudes to personal transport towards a far more sustainable and workable approach, reducing the strain on what’s going to be an increasingly stretched electricity generation system.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.