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Public Charging Regulation Authority

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Coming up to a year with my M3 and it's safe to say I'll never go back to ICE!

My experience is mostly positive, but what has let the whole EV thing down, is public (none Tesla) chargers. From broken hardware, ICEing, extortionate fees, slow charging etc.. it makes you grateful for the supercharger network. I really don't know if I'd stick to an EV if I had to rely on the current public network.

Which brings me to my question - Should there be (is there?) a body like OFWAT but for public networks?

Chargers in our area are using gov grants but the rollout has been terrible and the reliability has been scary.

A perfect example - they took 5 days to mark a charger as broken after a couple of phone calls - imagine you were down to your last mile arriving at the charger to discover it was broken and had been for some time. (I appreciate the 'don't let it get to that stage' but I'm sure we've all made mistakes and shouldn't be penalised for a shoddy network that we would expect to be online if the map says it is!).

If these networks were held to account by a body with some tooth, do you think the network as a whole would benefit?
 
Coming up to a year with my M3 and it's safe to say I'll never go back to ICE!

My experience is mostly positive, but what has let the whole EV thing down, is public (none Tesla) chargers. From broken hardware, ICEing, extortionate fees, slow charging etc.. it makes you grateful for the supercharger network. I really don't know if I'd stick to an EV if I had to rely on the current public network.

Which brings me to my question - Should there be (is there?) a body like OFWAT but for public networks?

Chargers in our area are using gov grants but the rollout has been terrible and the reliability has been scary.

A perfect example - they took 5 days to mark a charger as broken after a couple of phone calls - imagine you were down to your last mile arriving at the charger to discover it was broken and had been for some time. (I appreciate the 'don't let it get to that stage' but I'm sure we've all made mistakes and shouldn't be penalised for a shoddy network that we would expect to be online if the map says it is!).

If these networks were held to account by a body with some tooth, do you think the network as a whole would benefit?

We've already got OLEV so I presume they need to be given a governmental steer and some teeth. It's all well and good producing policy papers outlining an EV future but there needs to be some action on the here and now.
 
Scottish Government seem to have gone all in for rolling out a (currently) free public charging network of their own (reliability I can’t comment on as I am yet to use it) but it does seem to be steadily growing and at least rapids seem to be reliable. Their investment is probably because if they didn’t there wouldn’t be enough incentive / cost benefit for the “public” networks to roll out their infrastructure to most of rural Scotland.

I saw another post where someone was saying Wales seems to have issues in their rural areas where I guess you could call them “commercial” public networks haven’t bothered to invest yet.

Im surprised various local councils in England haven’t been encouraged to roll out charging at their car parks or at least their offices!
 
Weren't the government involved in awarding the monopoly on motorway charging to Ecotricity?

That worked well, didn't it . . .

Given the incompetence of government whenever it gets involved in anything commercial, my vote would be to let the market resolve things. As soon as there is a critical mass of EV owners, who have enough buying power to influence the market, then we'll see some of the current restrictive practices and high unit pricing change. It's too early for that at the moment, though, as the charger/charge point owners can call all the shots, knowing that they have the upper hand in the market right now.
 
There is a regulator already it’s called the DfT. I think what you want is for the Secretary of State for Transport (currently Grant Shapps) to introduce some more regulations.

I’d suggest he starts with Roaming ‘Plug & Charge’
1. All new publicly accessible High Power Chargers (20kW+) to enable ‘Plug & Charge’. Existing ones should get longer to comply. Objective: make charging convenient & easy.
2. Charge Point Operators to allow access to eMobility Service Providers. Objective: create a market for competition.

That said, if you think about maingau that probably isn’t enough to ensure fair prices & good maintenance. So:

3. If a charge point has not worked for 1 year or more, the Charge Point Operator should be required to auction it off to other operators.
 
I have posted similar topic last year. I think few years from now we will see the best charging solution survive on the market, for now we have to deal with semi baked/maintained charging solution.

Exactly, but things have changed at a snails pace over that year other than perhaps Tesla itself. Chargers are as unreliable as ever and prices are going up!

I think it's a cart and horse thing ... which comes first. The problem is that the commercial pressure that should result in better options and pricing will only come when there are a large number of EV owners. But people are reluctant to take a risk on EVs because the charging infrastructure is so poor so we are going to take very much longer to get to that point. Government does not need to take over from commercial providers they just need to get the market established and to set some basic ground rules. We're all delighted that the government should remove vehicle tax or provide grants for chargers ... why don't we just leave that to the market too? Well, obviously government intervention has increased the speed of take-up in a new and necessary personal vehicle transport system. (The private water companies in England showed the priorities of the commercial world ... and it wasn't to provide a consistent and good value service to their customers!)
 
Sticking single 50kW chargers in unsupervised car parks seems to be a stupid strategy, highly expensive to visit to repair and vulnerable to vandalism. Even if you found one working you might be behind another car that will take an hour to charge. I assume companies only do this as they get incentives from councils and DfT for installing chargers.
 
We are currently ‘staycationing’ in the Peak District where public chargers to put it politely are at a premium.
This morning we attempted to charge on a 7kw charger in Bakewell. There are 4 charging posts with 2 per post. Bearing in mind it’s a busy tourist car park only 1 post is accessible with just the 2 bays reserved for EVs. The other 6 bays are mixed use and hence ICE’d.
The post I connected to kept cutting out at 4kw / a few secs. 20 mins on hold to BP Chargemaster and eventually get through and having reset the post remotely the bloody thing decides to go offline (due to bad weather apparently?!). All the other inaccessible bays are online but of absolutely no use to anyone who needs them!

I’m realise I’m rather spoilt living in London with Superchargers on most routes but to have a non Tesla and rely on charge points like these would be a totally different EV owning experience. Would certainly make me think twice.
 
We are currently ‘staycationing’ in the Peak District where public chargers to put it politely are at a premium.
This morning we attempted to charge on a 7kw charger in Bakewell. There are 4 charging posts with 2 per post. Bearing in mind it’s a busy tourist car park only 1 post is accessible with just the 2 bays reserved for EVs. The other 6 bays are mixed use and hence ICE’d.
The post I connected to kept cutting out at 4kw / a few secs. 20 mins on hold to BP Chargemaster and eventually get through and having reset the post remotely the bloody thing decides to go offline (due to bad weather apparently?!). All the other inaccessible bays are online but of absolutely no use to anyone who needs them!

I’m realise I’m rather spoilt living in London with Superchargers on most routes but to have a non Tesla and rely on charge points like these would be a totally different EV owning experience. Would certainly make me think twice.

I agree. I just can't understand anyone shelling out on a Porsche Taycan or a Jag iPace. You'd basically be constrained to journeys within the range of a home charge unless you could deal with the stress and agro of the public network. Maybe £100k for something that is pretty useless for its intended purpose.