Great Britain Needs 8x More EV Chargers to Meet 2035 Demand
If a third of drivers go electric, while driver behaviour and technology remains the same as today, we’ll need 8x more chargers.
Summary
If all the cars and vans in Great Britain were converted to electric power overnight, the power demand would be 71 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year, with 22 TWh attributed to on-street households who would most likely be dependent on the public network.
Assuming current utilisation and power delivery averages, the public charging network outputs an estimated 0.9 TWh. Looking ahead to 2035, modelling a scenario where a third of the fleet is electric, suggests the network would need to be 8 times larger than it is today. Of course, this does assume that EVs do not become more efficient, utilisation rates do not improve and vehicle usage stays the same. In reality, all these factors will move and different observers will have different views on how far they will move.
What this research delivers is a robust view of the scale of the challenge ahead.
Key Findings
71 TWh Yearly Demand: If all cars and vans in Great Britain became electric overnight there’d be a yearly power demand of 71 TWh.
22 TWh on the Public Charging Network: On-street households would contribute 22 TWh to the yearly demand.
8x more chargers needed: Looking towards 2035, a scenario with one-third of cars and vans being electric suggests the charging network would need to expand 8 times.
Methodology
We have measured the annual mileages of every car and van with a valid MOT over recent years (140 million records).
This allows us to pair each vehicle with an equivalent EV to work out real world energy demand. We then work out where those vehicles are based and how many households in that area have access to off-street charging or will need public chargers.
This gives us the most accurate view of what EV charging demand is required today and into the future.
You can discover more about GigaMap, our charging demand dataset, here.
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