Rutland County Council strategy outlines new network of electric vehicle charging points

A new network of on street charging points will be rolled out across Rutland next year.

Rutland County Council’s cabinet signed off a new strategy yesterday (April 8), which outlined a timeline of activity including installing a network across the county.

The authority received £107,000 from the Government’s Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure fund for an initial pilot project and has £365,000 set aside in a capital programme for a second larger project to upgrade the county’s electric charging capacity.

The new strategy cabinet member Christine Wise (Lib Dem) said the strategy would need to be constantly refreshed to keep up with the fastly changing market and policies.

She said: “It provides a useful marker of our current thinking and planning, albeit, it will need constant updating, as government policy was altered yesterday, again and will undoubtedly be changed again very soon.

“As a local authority we want to maximise our usage of grants, government or otherwise, to expand the charging infrastructure to support current and future need.

“Left to the market alone there would be very limited development in rural areas, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth their while, so it is important we use these government funds to get the charging mechanism in place. The market in electric vehicles has fluctuated but current policy will see more expansion.The most often voiced concern about why people are not buying electric vehicles is lack of infrastructure.

"So this policy provides a structure around which we can develop and support future bids.”

The strategy says that at March last year there were 835 privately registered charging points in Rutland and just 23 publicly available charging points.

The report does not say how many charging points will be put in or where sited, as suitability assessments are still ongoing. The authority did a survey with residents last year about preferred locations although at the meeting Coun Wise said not all would receive a charging point. There were 61 sites put forward in the survey which was responded to by more than 250 residents.

Coun Wise said: “We surveyed residents to find out where people would like the points put. We had more on the list than we had funding for the pilot. We still have more on the list than will be funded by the main project, so we just need to keep applying for the next round of grants to work our way through the list.”

The five year strategy is focused on public on street domestic charging infrastructure and does not cover charging for electric bikes, buses or heavy goods vehicles; off street car parks (except local authority owned ones) and sites located off the public highway.

The council is forming with other neighbouring local authorities to form a consortium to get better deals from electric charging point providers.

An issue identified within the strategy is the impact it may have on electricity capacity for the county.

The report says: “EV [electric vehicle] growth will have a significant impact on electricity demand. If not managed carefully by the Distribution Network Operator (DNO) the additional demand will create challenges across all sections of the energy system, particularly at peak times. “