Colin Townend a.k.a. The Cable Guy has his say on home charging v public charging.

Last year almost a quarter (23%) of new cars were electric and a lot of effort is going into providing more public charge points. But more public charge points are not what many owners actually want or need.

Public charging costs twice as much as home charging and drivers have to walk back to move their car when it’s charged or risk being accused of blocking someone else from using the charger.

What residents do want, is to plug their car in at home and leave it to charge from their solar panels or charge overnight on half-price, off-peak electricity. This makes good use of surplus overnight wind power and reduces the daytime peak load on the grid.

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With V2G being implemented soon, electric cars will be able to return some electricity to the grid at peak times or load-shift individual households by charging at cheap rate overnight and supplying the house with power during full price tariff times. Conversely, if the owner has solar panels, the car could store any daytime surplus and supply the house after sunset.

Home charging can give 250 miles of range, so many drivers may never need to spend time finding an available charge point, one that is not occupied and not out of service.  I’ve had an electric car for three years and never used a public charger.

All of these benefits are currently available to people with off-street parking. But if drivers have to park in the street outside their house, they have the problem that the charging cable is a trip hazard. It is wrong that only those who can afford a house with off-street parking can charge their cars on half price electricity and have the other benefits of home charging. (This is not ‘levelling up’).

Also, by forcing more people to charge on public chargers, mostly during daytime, the electricity peak load is being worsened at a time when our future national generating capacity looks very unclear. Well, a Macclesfield company sell a product for £35 that solves this problem and the council in Bath & Somerset are arranging a trial of this and similar products.

OZEV should be guiding councils towards approving such devices, preferably by issuing national guidance so that the 333 local authorities and 150 highways authorities don’t have to spend time devising their own local policies. It’s even in the interests of the councils themselves; instead of spending money building public charge points, the councils could generate income from licensing on-street residential charging.

What do you think?

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