More competition at motorway services?

[Epico]

Just came across this...

CMA to open up electric vehicle charging competition on motorways

CMA action is paving the way for greater investment, greater choice, and competition on prices for electric vehicle drivers, by opening up competition in the charging sector.

www.gov.uk

The end to the ecotriticty/gridserve monopoly at service stations?

 

[NewbieT]

Gridserve basically had to relent otherwise the CMA would have acted. I'm not sure Gridserve were actively enforcing but it was probably enough to dissuade Moto et al from entering into discussions with others. Good outcome for the consumer. Well done CMA.

 

[MrBadger]

Do we know what sites may immediately benefit from this, ie sites covered by the Rapid Charging Funding?

 

[Stuart1714]

Although they haven’t spent any cash yet, I thought that a chunk of cash is earmarked to upgrading the power supply at a lot of services which may explain why the published rollout plans are quite poor, they have to sort the power out first before they can install lots of high speed chargers.

Welcome Break have been taken over and may be taking advantage of opening up competition. I’ve read that at South Mimms they have applied for their own branded 175 KWH chargers, 6 of them I believe.

Unlike the other services, Welcome Break don’t appear to have had very many of the old unreliable Ecotricity chargers replaced by Gridserve yet.

 

[davidmc]

Speculation:

I wonder if Ecotricity knew/guess this would happen and then sold out to Gridserve before it happened?

 

[Jason71]

The Irony is Gridserve are probably one of the best and cheapest out there. So EH has gone from being an embarrassment to having the potential to become an excellent network pretty rapidly. Look at Rugby.
The main thing holding back additional charging infrastructure at motorways now is probably power supply which is down to the Govt.
Are there really motorway sites with additional spare grid capacity that Gridserve could build out that they just aren't doing at this point?
Don't get me wrong competition is good and if any one company has all the capacity at a site however good they are now they are just one change of management / takeover from being a nightmare. On the other hand if competition just means. sites go to the highest bidder and we get exactly the same number of chargers GS would have installed but run by the company that bid the highest for the location. we get the same situation but higher prices now. I mean who wants to see an Ionity only site?
Hopefully this leads to multiple suppliers on a single site so there is some semblance of local competition

 

[Stuart1714]

Although they haven’t spent any cash yet, I thought that a chunk of cash is earmarked to upgrading the power supply at a lot of services which may explain why the published rollout plans are quite poor, they have to sort the power out first before they can install lots of high speed chargers.

Welcome Break have been taken over and may be taking advantage of opening up competition. I’ve read that at South Mimms they have applied for their own branded 175 KWH chargers, 6 of them I believe.

Unlike the other services, Welcome Break don’t appear to have had very many of the old unreliable Ecotricity chargers replaced by Gridserve yet.

Looks like the Welcome Break chargers in South Mimms have gone in already and could be up and running soon.

Welcome Break chargers @ South Mimms

 

[Plagued]

The Irony is Gridserve are probably one of the best and cheapest out there. So EH has gone from being an embarrassment to having the potential to become an excellent network pretty rapidly. Look at Rugby.
*snip*
Hopefully this leads to multiple suppliers on a single site so there is some semblance of local competition

I dread the idea of multiple suppliers with different apps and tiered rate systems. Having to work out which network to use based on who's going to reliable, and which of their different tiers of payment are applicable. For example twice I've tried to use polar chargers via the app rather than a card to save the 20% odd on the cost of charging only to have the app fail and have to resort to taping a payment card and over paying. Maybe if there was a minimum install of say 20 bays to stop people grabbing some grant funding and then dumping one or two neglected chargers up a bit like ecotricity did.
Ultimately more chargers is better, so let's see if they can actually manage to get the public charging network out of the gutter.

 

[browellm]

Speculation:

I wonder if Ecotricity knew/guess this would happen and then sold out to Gridserve before it happened?

I very much doubt if Gridserve won't have been aware of this themselves. It would have been part of any due dilligence.

 

[Cnixon]

Competition may still work if a supplier cannot have 2 consecutive locations on same motorway?