1,000s of free car chargers pulled from UK roads

Soaring energy costs have caused thousands of free charging stations to be removed from UK streets, putting a kink in government plans to switch drivers over to electric cars.

Electric car chargers, Newmarket, UK. Photo by Alamsen, 2015. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Thousands of electric car chargers pulled from UK roads after energy price surge | The Telegraph - James Titcomb:

May 7, 2023 - "Thousands of free electric car chargers have been pulled from Britain's roads over the past year as soaring energy costs makes them unaffordable to offer. The number of chargers offering free electricity has fallen from 5,715 a year ago to 3,568, a drop of almost 40%. They now make up less than one in 10 public chargers on Britain’s roads, compared to one in five a year ago.

"The drop in free top-up charging spots is the latest blow to the Government’s ambitions to attract motorists to electric cars by making it cheap and convenient to charge them away from home. The figures, from Zap Map, which monitors installations across the UK and is used by the Government to publish official data on charging points, come as concerns about the price of owning an electric vehicle threaten to slow their adoption.... 

"Free charging points were installed by supermarkets and car park operators as a way to attract owners of battery-powered vehicles, but wholesale electricity prices spiked last year amid concerns about energy security following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. While prices have come down, they remain more than double what they were two years ago.

"Tesco stopped offering free electric car charging to shoppers in November. The supermarket was the UK’s biggest provider of free points, having introduced them to hundreds of car parks since 2019. The Irish electricity network ESB began requiring payment for more than 300 previously free charging points in Northern Ireland at the end of April.

"Melanie Shufflebotham, Zap Map’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said: 'Free charging has been more common as an incentive for locations like supermarkets and car parks to draw in customers. But as electric vehicles become mainstream it’s quite reasonable that it is in decline.... We will continue to see lots more chargers and many may still be free as some destinations look to encourage green travel, but the percentage is likely to be low. Meanwhile charging either at home or on the public networks will continue to be more affordable on a pence per mile basis than petrol or diesel.'"

Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/07/thousands-electric-car-chargers-uk-roads-energy-price-surge/