The UK installed a record number of public electric car chargers in 2024, although the rate of growth slowed as installers contended with delays to government funding, according to Zapmap, whose data the government uses.
Numbers rose by more than a third to reach 73,421 by 20 December, according to Zapmap’s data. The increase of 19,600 was nearly equivalent to the total number of chargers at the end of 2020.
Charger companies are racing to install points to serve the more than 1m electric cars on British roads. Demand is expected to rise steeply as rules force manufacturers to sell more electric cars every year. The National Audit Office said this month that the number of public charge points was on track to meet a target of 300,000 by 2030but it flagged concerns about their concentration in urban areas.
The industry is also contending with slower growth than expected in demand for battery cars, even though nearly one in five new cars sold in Britain this year is powered by electricity. The number of chargers increased by 36% in the year to 20 December, Zapmap said, compared with 45% in 2023.
Several people in the charger industry said delays to the government’s local electric vehicle infrastructure (Levi) fund were hampering their efforts to keep up the pace of charger installations.
Vicky Read, who is the chief executive of Charge UK, a lobby group, said 2024 would go down as a boom year, but with a “slight tail-off towards the end”.
She said the slow rollout of Levi funding was contributing to the slowdown, as well as hesitation from charge point operators and investors worried about the expected relaxation of the UK’s electric car quotas.
The relaxation of the quotas, known as the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, would be welcomed by many petrol and diesel carmakers, but the charger industry is concerned it could imperil billions of pounds of its investments because it would mean fewer electric cars on the roads.
Read said that she still expected another record for public charger installations in 2025. Also. Robin Heap, the chief executive of the charge point company Zest, said that pressure on local authorities was delaying installations in some places, with wide variations in capabilities between different areas.
Londoners are still by far the best served in Britain. Government analysis of Zapmap data to July showed the capital has 234 public chargers for each 100,000 people. Scotland is the only region outside London with more than 100 chargers for each 100,000, while Northern Ireland has by far the worst provision, at only 32.
“They’re all struggling to make ends meet, and the government is saying you need to install a lot of charger infrastructure,” said Heap. “I think that we are not as far progressed as we need to be,” he said.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
