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“Alongside lowering upfront costs, we’re also making fantastic progress towards expanding our charging network across the UK,” said Lilian Greenwood, the future of roads minister. “With a new chargepoint added to the network every half an hour, we’re helping put range anxiety firmly in the rear-view mirror.”
But range anxiety is just one part of the equation for prospective EV buyers. While chargepoints in public locations are important for those worried about running out of charge while they are on the road, drivers have another big fear about EV charging: the cost.
“If we’re serious about moving forward with EVs then we have got to work out how to reduce the cost of charging for people without access to home charging,” says John Ellmore, editor of Electric Car Guide. Ellmore says the UK is “penalising drivers without off-street parking,” which can harm adoption of EVs.
Many would-be EV drivers shy away because they are unable to charge them outside their apartment blocks or on the street, instead of in a garage with a home charger. Public EV charging can cost 10-times more than the equivalent charge at home.
A recent nationwide experiment by the Centre for Net Zero and Octopus Electroverse gave 110,000 EV drivers access to dynamic ‘plunge pricing’ events over 11 weeks, showing how they altered their behaviour depending on the price. Selected public chargepoints were offered time‑limited discounts of 15% or 40% whenever wholesale prices fell because of high renewable output on the electricity grid. The findings were stark: when prices dropped by 40%, chargers with the lower costs saw a 117% increase in demand. Even with a 15% price reduction, demand spiked 30%.
The findings are strong evidence that EV charging costs need to come down in order to stimulate EV demand, argues Andy Hackett, one of the authors of the report. “EVs are a big hit for demand flexibility,” he says. “They're these big, flexible loads that will both put pressure on the future electricity grid but… also act as assets for the future grid, if you can optimise that demand.”
Working out how to stoke and tamp down that demand, particularly when considering the proportion of people who want to charge at home, is tricky. “The cost gap is a barrier, especially for those without off-street parking who rely entirely on public points,” says Migi Chuang, co-founder of Mobility Infotech, which provides software for taxi and car rental companies. “That’s why strategies like dynamic pricing and increasing the number of chargepoints in accessible locations are vital.”
Many of the suggestions made by the Centre for Net Zero’s report focus on dynamic pricing, but there are also engineering opportunities to reduce the overall costs of EV charging. “Other ways to reduce charging costs include improving charging technology to increase speed and efficiency, which lowers the time drivers spend at stations,” says Chuang.
One suggestion she has is to adopt smart chargers that can communicate with the grid, optimising when vehicles withdraw power from the grid to reduce the operational costs. “Additionally, government subsidies and partnerships with private firms can help fund infrastructure expansion and bring down upfront costs,” she says.
Dynamic pricing integrated into charging points, whether they’re public or private ones, is an engineering challenge that should be overcome to improve EV adoption, Hackett says. “I think there will be opportunities for new chargepoint operators to either collaborate with electricity suppliers or just get… time-of-use tariffs and pass that on,” he says. They will need to develop software that can do that, including collaborating across different public charging apps.
All of that is vital if the EV industry is to meet its potential, and to meet the forecast figures for EV adoption. “With EV sales rising sharply and public chargepoints growing, combining these approaches could make EV ownership more affordable and practical for a wider range of people, supporting the transition to cleaner transport,” Chuang says.
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