Councils who bid for government grants to install electric vehicle charging points must be aware of the ‘sting in the tail’ of ongoing management costs, warns InstaVolt chief executive Tim Payne.
In a wide ranging interview on electric vehicles with New Power, Payne said local authorities had to be ready for the complexity of managing the infrastructure and the charging regimes. He explained: “You don’t have only an electrical connection, there is also a software connection, so the car talks to the charger about technology. You have a lot of interaction between technology and charge and you need to keep abreast of software updates, which happen quite often.”
Payne, whose company plans to install fast chargers on a variety of sites including council-owned areas, said he fully supported government grants for chargers and applauded the initiative. But he said, “Councils are bidding for that money but then they have to operate [the chargers]. It can cost the local authority quite a lot of money to outsource that operation somewhere else, or they have to set up dedicated resource to do it. So you can end up with local authorities having stranded assets that cost quite a lot of money to operate.”
He said in the long term charger operators might need a call centre for users, remote monitoring and a team on the ground that can visit chargers that are out of operation, to get them back into service.
In December the Department for Transport’s On Street Residential Grant Scheme (£2.5 million), launched guidance for Local Authorities UK-wide to apply for funding for provision of charge points in residential areas, where there is a lack of off-street parking.
Payne says: “At the moment local authorities feel they have to put infrastructure in place. There is a government grant there so why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? But you do have to think, what happens post installation? It may be that you take the grant, install it and ask someone like us to operate it. We are not averse to that.”
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