Plymouth Council will be trialling new ways to support residents who cannot charge their EVs at home.
The trial is to support residents who don’t have private driveways or garages to charge their vehicles. Currently around 37% of households in Plymouth do not have off-street parking and have to travel to charge their EVs.
As part of its EV strategy, the Council is allocating £2.415m of funding obtained from the government’s Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) fund to install:
• 100 pavement channels to enable residents to run a cable from an electricity supply in their house. This is new for Plymouth and would initially be done on a trial basis.
• 600 pedestal and/or flush fitting 7kW chargers (servicing 1,200 charging bays). These will be publicly available chargers installed on streets and in car parks in areas where residents do not have access to off-street parking.
Many of the existing public EV chargepoints in Plymouth are super-fast chargers. There is, however, a lack of chargers in residential areas, where residents often wish to charge their cars more cheaply overnight.
EV uptake in Plymouth has been slower than the UK average, with only 1.5% of 134,000 registered cars and vans as of mid 2024, compared to over 4.6% across the UK. Affordability and insufficient financial incentives, along with perceived range anxiety have been some of the key barriers to EV uptake in Plymouth.
Councillor Mark Coker, cabinet member for transport, says: “EVs are a key component for how we get out and about in the future and it’s great to see that the city is starting to adapt and put this into practice.
“We already have over 300 parking bays for EV charging across the city, but we need to make it easier for residents to charge EVs close to home.”
