FT.com: London’s attempt to spread the use of electric cars has been hampered by a lack of working charging points and disputes over network maintenance, inconveniencing motorists who want to go green.
The capital has more than 1,300 public charging points spread over about 900 terminals on 300 sites. But surveys of the live network map by the Financial Times show that in central London, where the majority of on-street charging in the capital takes place, more than 40 per cent of the charging posts are out of service.
The disarray is being exacerbated by confusion and squabbling among myriad interested parties, including the operator of the service, 27 London boroughs and 39 private partners including charge point manufacturers and car park operators, over who is responsible for maintaining the network.
“London has not got its act together on electric vehicles,” said Mark Walker, UK managing director of Zipcar, one of the world’s leading car-sharing networks. “There’s a real lack of clarity at the moment as to what London wants to achieve with EVs and what infrastructure you need to provide to make that happen.”
The issue gets to the heart of the obstacles facing electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, which are seen as a way of lowering transport emissions, particularly in large cities, but still account for less than 3 per cent of cars in the UK.
In cities such as London, where as much as three-quarters of parking is on-street rather than on driveways or in garages, drivers of electric vehicles are at the mercy of public charging points.
Transport for London set up the electric vehicle charging network at the instruction of Boris Johnson, the mayor, in May 2011.
At the start of September, Bluepoint London, a subsidiary of the French Bolloré group, took over the infrastructure network, known as Source London, with ambitions to more than quadruple the number of battery-charging outlets in the capital to 6,000 by 2018, as well as launching a car-sharing service run by a separate part of the group.
TfL says that when it sold the service as part of a £1m deal, the agreement was that the scheme operator, Bluepoint, was responsible for paying a grant for repairs to the owner of the charge stations.
David Martell, chief executive of Chargemaster, an installer, also says Bluepoint is contractually obliged to pay £500 a year per station to owners of charge stations to pay for maintenance — and is failing to do so.
“It’s very complex and very messy and the people that are suffering from this are the electric vehicle motorists in London,” he said.
But Bluepoint said that it was only responsible for reimbursing the owners of the charge points, often the local authorities, and that so far only three parties had invoiced the company for repairs.
Christophe Arnaud, director of Bluepoint, said the network was in “exactly the state we found it in when we took over”, with 23 per cent of points overall out of service, though the figure is higher for central London.
He added that councils were not invoicing the company because the cost of the repairs was often well in excess of the £500 cap.
Bluepoint is now attempting to push through an altered agreement with the London boroughs under which it would take control of charge point maintenance and set up round-the-clock support for the network.
The agreement would also enable Bluepoint to access more parking bays for new charge points and allow it to increase charging fees.
Drivers pay just £5 a year to Source London and, in return, receive free parking and free charging. Bluepoint’s plan seeks to levy a fee of as much as £5 an hour to park and charge in the area corresponding to Zone 1 of the London transport network.
Mr Arnaud said the company was having “constructive discussions” with the partners on the project and was close to formalising a new agreement with some local authorities.
Bolloré, which runs the Autolib scheme in Paris, had planned to put about 100 electric rental vehicles on the road by the end of last year, but has been forced to postpone the rollout due to the inadequate state of the charging network.
“They can’t bring vehicles to London if the network is not working properly because that will make people even more disgruntled,” said a person close to the company.
