We’re charging headlong with the EV fix, without recognising all the implications

THE SWITCH to Electric Vehicles is in the news (yet) again, this time caught up in the Trump tariff turmoil. Reacting to the new uncertainty for car makers, the government has changed the Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate “to make it easier for industry to upgrade to make electric vehicles”. The effect of this will be to slow the transition to a fully electric fleet, meaning that, once again, easing off on the Net Zero target is seen as a simple answer to a different problem.

Meanwhile, the preparatory work to increase electricity supply to meet the predicted EV demand, delayed though it might be, goes on. Assuming this supply can be generated, and that’s no easy thing, how the electricity actually gets to the vehicles is the next conundrum: at electricity ‘filling’ stations; at supermarkets or service areas; on the driveways of some of the nation’s homes and maybe in their garages (the few that aren’t used for storing anything but cars); or on the streets (and possibly footways) outside the homes of those with no off-street space. This, too, is no small matter. National power supply, the grid network, local distribution systems, and e-fuel delivery infrastructure all need to be transformed.

While I (and others) can see lots of issues at the higher levels of the electricity supply challenge, it’s the implications for our streetscapes and public realm that exercise me most. And here, as with the whole ‘dash for EVs’, I consider the amount of rational thought from those leading the change to be inadequate for the challenges being faced. At street level, I know that some local authorities are on the case. However, this proactive minority isn’t yet large enough to allow me to think that the all-EV future that most of our politicians and media seem to think can be willed into being can be achieved either as quickly as it’s needed or without numerous disbenefits that ought to be considered unacceptable.

Southwark and Ealing are among councils who have sought to set out a clear strategy for electric vehicle charging

There’s also the possibility, that we’re putting too much effort and belief into what may prove to be the ‘Betamax version’ of the EV future, as the technology moves on

With all this in mind, I was reading the London Borough of Southwark’s 2024 Electric Vehicle Plan the other day, one of the authorities that has got its head round this topic. As I often find with documents like this, the most interesting stuff comes right up front, where the tone is being set. In this case, the first section of the Plan is Southwark’s ‘Vision for Electric Vehicles’, and the first sentence of that vision is this:

‘The most impactful car journey is the one that isn’t taken’!

The truth of that statement might be hotly debated by some, but I love the fact that Southwark comes straight out by saying that EVs aren’t some kind of transport panacea, and need to be considered in a wider transport planning context. Such clarity and honesty contrasts sharply with the hopeful (and perhaps disingenuous) utterances of those (especially politicians) who desperately want to believe (or choose to pretend) that EVs – and other tech fixes – will somehow save them from having to engage directly with the truth that significantly reducing car ownership and car use is the only viable long-term path to reducing the many negative effects of that ownership and use – something that a switch to EVs simply cannot fix.

The Southwark EV Plan goes on to list four ‘Opportunities’ (read Pros) and six ‘Challenges’ (Cons) relating to EVs. I think they’re probably being too kind with their assessment of pros, with only two-and-a-half of the four things listed reading to me as convincing benefits. Meanwhile, all six of the Cons seem to me to be entirely valid, and I don’t think they’re exhaustive. I show the balance sheet here.

Southwark’s electric vehicle plan sets out a balance sheet of the opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed to deliver a suitable strategy for EV charging at local level.

The past and present Governments both seemed/seem to adhere to a common faith that the switch to EVs is being a painless way for transport to ‘go green’ without having to challenge the status quo regarding our attitudes to car ownership and use. Thus, we had a Conservative Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps) writing in his Foreword to 2021’s Decarbonising Transport white paper that, “It’s not about stopping people doing things: it’s about doing the same things differently. We will still drive on improved roads, but increasingly in zero emission cars.” This despite him also, in the same piece, writing that “it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery (from the pandemic)” and that “we cannot, of course, believe that zero emission cars (and lorries) will solve all our problems”.

Then, of course, a couple of years later, we had the last Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, thinking that appealing to our ‘love affair with the car’ was a vote winner and publishing his risible ‘Plan for Drivers’.

Mind you, the current Prime Minister is not averse to playing driver-friendly cards, either. In a recent speech from a Halford’s car centre, he said that, because “it’s extremely hard and difficult to be a motorist on a modest income these days… we need to drive down the cost of motoring because that’s a lifeline for so many people”. The second clause of this quote ought really to have been “…we need to provide such people with much better non-car options, freeing them from costly car dependency”.

He didn’t say anything like that, however, because he and his current crop of ministers seem, like their predecessors, to be holding fast to an electric-cars-future, as opposed to the necessary fewer-cars-future that the Southwark EV Plan shows so simply and clearly to be the wiser path.

The EV-based future was a feature of the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill presented last month, which amongst many other things, sets out proposals to streamline the approval of street works needed for the installation of EV public charge points. The published Guide to this Bill states this proposal arises from the government being “committed to supporting the transition to electric vehicles and plans to accelerate the rollout of EV charging infrastructure” and to ensuring that “everyone has access to reliable and convenient public charging, by making it quicker, easier, and cheaper to install EV infrastructure, helping to deliver a more comprehensive and reliable network of chargepoints around England”.

“Everyone” doesn’t actually need this provision, of course, and such a statement is further evidence of the inability to see beyond the status quo of our motorised and car-dependent society that urgently needs to be changed, not just cleaned up a bit.

The Bill was extensively covered LTT911, with the front-page report noting that there was “no obvious effort to dovetail its significant transport planning and policy dimensions with the transport elements of the already announced Local Government Reorganisation and Devolution Plans… or to embrace whatever the promised Integrated National Transport Strategy being prepared by the DfT may include”.

Referring specifically to the EV charging infrastructure proposals, the report observed that “some read this as very deregulatory, and potentially heralding conflicts over the use of chargers obstructing pavements and kerbsides”. I don’t think the writer was intentionally referring to me, but he might as well have been.

I am, as many of you will readily imagine, deeply concerned about the potentially negative effects of EV charging paraphernalia on the walking environment, and indeed, the wider streetscape and character of both our commercial and residential areas. It’s something I’ve touched upon specifically in at least two previous pieces (LTT757 and LTT778, respectively from September 2018 and August 2019) and more generally in numerous other articles about the kerbside and about clutter, over my 20 years as an LTT contributor.

Take, for example, the kind of EV-related infrastructure with which the Bill concerns itself: dedicated chargepoints. I have an in-principal objection to walking being made more challenging so that commercial enterprises can sell fuel from the footway. That doesn’t mean I consider there’s no place for charging units in the footway (though I’d much prefer them in the carriageway), but it does mean that they need to be very thoughtfully designed and located so that they have no greater detrimental effect on walking or wheeling than a well-placed tree, bench or lamp column. (And, of course, some chargepoints are lamp columns!)

In the light of the seeming centrality of an E-car-based future to its thinking on transport, the government’s keenness to expedite the rollout of EV charging infrastructure makes me apprehensive that it will plough ahead as fast as possible with this objective without due consideration of the consequences. This is much in the same way as its fixation on building 1.5 million new homes in five years may lead it to brush aside the wise integration of land use and transport planning, and housing design.

Public EV chargers, of different shapes and sizes, and their attendant feeder pillars, are often placed on footways with little if any regard to their effect on the walking environment. And while ‘pop-up’ units like the Trojan (bottom right) may seem to address this issue, they may be an even greater hazard (because less easy to see and avoid) when they’re in use.

Local authorities can also get caught up in the rush for EVs, though I’m glad to say that Southwark isn’t alone in seeing the bigger picture. Ealing Council published its draft EV Charging Strategy in late 2024, and although its vision statement isn’t as blunt as Southwark’s, it does do a good job of putting EVs in their proper place. The Ealing vision is that “By 2030, all EV users will have reliable and convenient access to charging infrastructure, to support journeys that need to be made by private vehicles. This vision is part of the wider Ealing Transport Strategy, which aims for walking, cycling and wheeling to be the natural choices for everyday journeys”. Please note the use of “all EV users”, compared to the government’s “everyone”.

The Ealing Strategy goes on to note that although the Council had previously set a target of 2,000 chargers in the borough by 2026, this is well ahead of projected need. The current estimate is that the borough will need 2,450 chargers by 2030. The market (demand) for EVs may well change between now and then, of course, but it’s encouraging to see that Ealing recognises an all-EV future is not only just a modest part of the picture, but also that it’s not just a matter of setting targets, however well-meant.

The sheer practicalities of moving to an all-EV future are routinely overlooked and, in this regard, let me point you in the direction of a fascinating piece from across the Atlantic, written last year by Jonathan Lesser on behalf of the US National Center for Energy Analytics. Entitled What Would an All-EV Future Look Like? in it, Lesser goes line by line, so to speak, through the estimated costs of enabling ‘just’ the city of Dallas to support every car in the city being an EV. Starting with an average-sized neighbourhood of 400 homes, each with an average of two cars, he looks first at the cost of buying domestic chargers, installing the necessary wiring, and the likely need for upgrading older electric panels to support the extra load. He makes those domestic costs around $1m for the single neighbourhood.

A variety of privately deployed cross-footway (in one case over-footway) domestic charging ‘installations’ seen within a short walk of where I live. Some users seem to recognise the trip hazard possibility and make an effort to minimise it; others seem barely to care. The legality of all of them is, at best, dubious.

Then he looks at the additional power supply needed to feed these domestic chargers, and the likely need to upgrade old kit while doing so, and calculates an additional cost of $7,000 per EV, or $5.6m for the neighbourhood. Lesser reckons Dallas comprises around 1,200 such neighbourhoods, making the total costs for the city over $6 billion (over and above the $1.2 billion of direct householder costs).

After that he estimates more millions for serving apartment blocks; upgrading of substations and transmission lines; and thousands of new non-domestic chargepoints. Excluding the householder costs, that gets him to over $7 billion to Dallas, then $100 billion or more for Texas. Next, he considers the wider implications for the supply and demand and rising costs of related raw materials, and some of the wider effects on the economy and environment (like petrol/diesel stations going out of business and forests being felled for new electricity poles.)

And so it goes. Lesser’s estimate for the total costs to the USA is between $2-$4 trillion dollars.

I can’t do full justice to this piece here, so please read it yourself (it’s wonderfully succinct). I’ll only add his concluding paragraph:

The headlong rush toward EVs, driven by subsidies and mandates, ignores the physical and economic realities involved. Policymakers may try to ignore that reality, but reality will always make itself known.

This does a beautiful job of summing up the heart of my own concern about this and the previous government’s approach to EVs as a relatively ‘cost free’ and painless means for reducing the environmental impacts of car ownership and use. One could summarise it even further as, “They simply haven’t thought this through”.

Were they minded to do the necessary thinking, they could put all the really expensive and disruptive infrastructure required alongside the following truth, from the 2012 book Strap Hanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, by the Canadian author Taras Grescoe.

Even if a zero-emission miracle-car, running on tap-water and yielding only lavender-scented exhaust, appeared in dealerships tomorrow, it would not solve the fundamental problem. The automobile was never an appropriate technology for cities. As a form of mass transportation for the world, it is a disaster.

Screenshots of web pages published by OZEV, which seems to be the Government’s chosen body to promulgate ‘best practice’ on EV charging. The one on the right illustrates the idea of installing cable channels buried in the pavement.

It may well be countered that all governments aren’t quite so blind to the practicalities of the transition to EVs as Lesser seems to imply, and are diligently looking for suitable solutions to all the challenges indicated . But getting everything actually sorted is certainly a colossal task, and of questionable long-term justification and value.

For example, the UK Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV) recently issued a policy paper entitled Improving the grid connection process for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. I don’t think this classifies as the kind of bad news that governments try to bury by publishing at times where the public attention is elsewhere, but this paper – along with four others on related matters from OZEV – came out last Christmas Eve!

It states that, “The transition to electric vehicles is critical if we are to meet our net zero goals. To aid this transition, we must ensure that the necessary systems and processes are in place to develop infrastructure at pace. To achieve this, industry stakeholders in both the energy and transport sectors need simplified processes to ensure the timely approval and installation of infrastructure.” Importantly, and perhaps too candidly, it also notes that, “Prior to this transition, stakeholders in these areas rarely had to interact”, and although it states that “we are now beginning to see collaboration”, it is the need for so many parties to sing from the same hymn sheet in almost perfect harmony that is one of the biggest challenges ahead.

The paper continues: “Compared to other sectors, some stakeholders on the transport side are less used to having to navigate the process for securing grid connections at such a significant scale. The increased electrification of transport also presents challenges for distribution network operators (DNOs) as there is increased demand on their processes and resources. Streamlining these processes, ironing out inconsistencies and mapping out future demand is the best way to ensure future rollout is efficient, smooth and delivered on time. To achieve this, this document sets out clear action points in which all stakeholders involved in EV charging infrastructure deployment (including central government) can contribute to a better system that works for all."

If you want to read all this in more detail, it is included in the references at the end of the article.

While OZEV’s heart and mind seems to be the right place, it’s not unreasonable to wonder how these reasonable aspirations are working out in practice- and a realistic and affordable timeline for their delivery ?

One specialist in the field, a chap called Jonny Rigall who works for Aether, a climate change consultancy, considers that Lesser’s American viewpoint may be a little outdated, because a ‘whole-systems’ understanding of smarter local and national transport is bringing forward a range of new solutions to the problems laid out in the Dallas case study.

That said, Rigall isn’t taking anything for granted. He calls the OZEV paper “a good representation of the problems and who they’ve identified to resolve them”. However, he also notes that delivering net zero transport will need collaborative working between the Departments for Transport (DfT), Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DDCMS), the Offices of Communications (Ofcom) and Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), and the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). Whether the necessary level of integrated cooperation will happen in the real world is another matter, of course.

Rigall says he has to hope that everyone is talking to each other, but admits that some of his acquaintance would probably roar with laugher at his optimism and hopefulness!

I now head towards my close by referring to an earlier think-piece, written in 2018 by Rigall (then at Stantec) and his then colleague, Scott Witchalls. Entitled The Road to Zero or the Road to Roadworks?, this piece reads to me as raising the same basic concern that Lesser does. And, reflecting on it now, Rigall notes that, of the ‘Top five obvious facts why universal home charging won’t happen in the next 10 years’ listed in the article, not one has been resolved in the ensuing seven years!

Putting to one side the evident gap between what’s possible in technological terms and what’s actually happening to realise that potential, I’m going to use the ‘Road to Roadworks’ prompt to finish this article by returning to street level, both literally and figuratively. What does the rush for EVs mean to ordinary people, whether they are (or might one day be) EV owners, or whether they’re just using the streets where all the EVs are going to be charged?

Although Ealing’s EV Charging Strategy does not itself mention this, the relevant page on the Council’s website states that “You are not allowed to run a cable across the public pavement, due to health and safety risks” (Part IX of the Highways Act 1980 applies). I live in Ealing, and I can tell you that many EV owners in the borough are currently doing precisely what they’re not allowed to. Of these ‘many’, some make obvious attempts to minimise the hazard that their cables present to passers-by. Others don’t seem to care. Most nevertheless present some obstacle to some users, especially people who need to get around by wheeling; and all diminish the overall quality and ambience of the streetscape. I include a clutch of photos of such home-made charging there were taken within a 10-minute walk of my house. (I also have many others, from further afield.)

Another of the OZEV documents issued on Christmas Eve was guidance on Cross-pavement solutions for charging electric vehicles. I haven’t got space to say much more about this here, except to say that it covers two types of solution – cable channels embedded within the pavement and permanent under-pavement cables – focusing on the first. The Ealing strategy also covers the first of these, outlining some of the potential pitfalls, and also introduces a third – overhead charging – and a potential fourth – wireless charging. Again, I include a few photos by way of illustration.

This OZEV guidance takes rather a lot for granted about what we want the future of our streets to be like beyond an EV fuelling environment, and I’d encourage relevant local authority officers to give it a careful look.

Approved Document S of the 2010 Building Regulations (2021 edition). The influences on EV charging provision can be found in places you might not think to look...

One other consideration about domestic EV charging that I can do no more here than point you towards is the combined implications of Approved Document S of the 2010 Building Regulations (Infrastructure for the charging of electric vehicles) and the Low Voltage Design Policy published by the Independent Networks Association. You probably know both of these by heart, right? Anyway, put these two together and you have (a) a requirement for every new residential building with associated parking to have access to EV charge points and (b) a ruling that, if the charger cannot be wired back to the domestic meter, then additional grid capacity would need to be provided. This means, in short, that if a progressive developer wants to put all or most of the car parking for the development in a mobility hub or ‘car barn’ located away from the residential buildings themselves, extra grid capacity needs to be provided (and paid for), even if the actual demand is the same as it would be for all the individual home-end charges combined. Hey ho.

While it’s easy to have a go at domestic charging arrangements, supposedly ‘legit’ non-domestic on-street chargers also reduce the visual and practical qualities of our streets, and do so in a way that wouldn’t be considered reasonable were the object in question to be something else. Would we tolerate lots of little petrol pumps, for example? And might some of those who see no harm in a proliferation of EV chargers be people who complain about bike stands or hangars, or wheelie bins?

What all this suggests to me is that we’ve somehow got ourselves into a position where the ‘need’ to charge electric vehicles seems to justify almost any means of doing so, whatever the impact on the street or the people who use it. Must we be set to hear again the lame cry that justifies the likes of inconsiderate parking, loading and unloading or dumping household waste at the roadside : “What else am I supposed to do?”

In case I’ve not made it clear, I consider that having an all-electric car fleet is not a bad thing in itself, but I nevertheless advocate a pause in our headlong charge towards that all-EV future. There needs to be a conversation about that future that embraces far more than just the technological and financial challenges of providing the necessary infrastructure. And that’s a conversation that needs to take into account other technological advancements. How far away, for example, is the day when EV batteries can be charged indoors, not just in-vehicle? The procedure could then become one of swapping battery packs, not plugging the vehicles themselves in – at least, not nearly as often. Or, as the Ealing strategy points towards, might cable-free charging soon be a commonplace.

Might there not also be an issue with the finding and mining of all the required ‘rare earth’ minerals for all the cars and all the batteries that would be needed for a fully EV future, and not just for all the cars in the UK, of course? And, if there is, does our alleged ‘need’ for these minerals justify the downsides of the mining, refining and manufacturing processes: both on the natural environment and on the communities directly and indirectly involved?

Pardon my scepticism, but – as you can tell – I really can’t see that this magic all-EV future and its consequences has been properly given the high level attention it deserves And, I’ll say again, I fear that that’s at least partly because those in power want to believe in an electric-cars-future, because they can’t or don’t want to face the fact that what’s really need is a fewer-cars-future.

EVs surely do need to be part of a cleaner transport future, but it’s vital that we don’t move so fast on this one solution towards it that we lose sight of the other transport transformations that are more urgently needed, that we don’t overlook the negative effects of EVs and their paraphernalia on our streets, and that we don’t put all out eggs into a ‘Betamax’ basket. What EV versions of VHS, DVD, Blue Ray, mpegs and streaming that changed another field of technology might be just on the horizon?

In coming into office, Keir Starmer made much of his Plan for Change. Concerning EVs, he needs to be ready to change his plan.

References and Links

• London Borough of Southwark’s 2024 Electric Vehicle Plan

• Decarbonising Transport white paper 2021

• Planning and Infrastructure Bill March 2025

• London Borough of Ealing draft EV Charging Strategy 2024

• US National Center for Energy Analytics. What Would an All-EV Future Look Like? By Jonathan Lesser

• Book Strap Hanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, published in 2021 by Canadian author Taras Grescoe

• UK Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV) policy paper Improving the grid connection process for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Dec 2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-the-grid-connection-process-for-electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure/improving-the-grid-connection-process-for-electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure#vision

• OZEV Cross-pavement solutions for charging electric vehicles Dec 2024

• Jonny Rigall and Scott Witchalls ‘The Road to Zero or the Road to Roadworks?’ Stantec 2018

• The Building Regulations 2010 Infrastructure for the Charging of Electric Vehicles 2021

• The Building Regulations 2010 Infrastructure for the Charging of Electric Vehicles 2021 edition https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6218c5d38fa8f54911e22263/AD_S.pdf
  

• INA Low Voltage Design Policy DOCUMENT NO: ETSC-DES-001 https://ina.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/INA-Low-Voltage-Design-Policy.pdf