London gets city-wide electric vehicle charging network

Source London will allow electric vehicle owners to plug in to 1,300 publicly accessible points across the city by 2013.

At that point, there will be more charging points than petrol stations in London, providing Londoners with the opportunity to charge their vehicle at charge points on residential streets, in supermarkets, public car parks and at shopping and leisure centres.

Annual membership of the Source London scheme is £100, enabling cardholders to charge up at any Source London point whenever they need to.

The scheme initially launched with 150 new charge points making it London’s largest single charging network. This is a significant boost in the number of publicly accessible charge points from the existing 250, which are currently operated through a range of different localised schemes.

There are currently 17,000 hybrid and pure electric vehicles being used in Greater London. The mayor wants to boost this to 100,000 and help London become the electric capital of Europe by making it easier to charge electric vehicles.