Report encourages EV owners to charge at home

The new report argues that home charging is more convenient for motorists, has a lower carbon footprint and could also be integrated with smart meters.

Making the announcement, transport secretary Philip Hammond said: ’Public chargepoints are part of the answer but putting a chargepoint on every corner is not the right approach. Electric cars mean getting out of the mentality of needing to travel to a petrol station and into the habit of refuelling when a vehicle is not being used.’

Speaking to The Engineer, Prof Roger Kemp of Lancaster University, who advises the government on EV strategy, said part of the motivation behind home charging was that installing public chargepoints was simply too expensive.

He said: ‘At the moment it costs about £5,000 a throw and given that you’ll probably sell £3–£4-worth of electricity a night, it’s pretty difficult to see how you could make much money without fairly heavy subsidies.

‘I think they’re being realistic, and asking which of the groups is it easier to get EVs into and it’s probably those that have got their own off-street parking and for whom an electric vehicle is a sort of second car.’