Who is paying for free EV charging

silvercar

At a few train stations near to me, there is free EV charging supplied by pod-point (one of the many home charger suppliers). For the cost of the normal car parking fee, I can leave my car all day and it charges for free. Clearly popular as I have to monitor the app to see when there is a charger free. Today I paid £3 to charge my car for 200 miles, clearly a win for me.

I'm curious who pays for this. Looking at podpoint website, it doesn't appear that they are paying. I can't see how the railways would gain from this. The car park operators can't be paying as the car park is generally full, so they could easily fill the spaces without offering charging.

So who pays?

Sandtree

silvercar said:

So who pays?

Without knowing all the commercial arrangements between the parties you aren't going to know exactly who's writing it down as part of their ESG policy or corporate strategy

Petriix

Tesco have a commercial arrangement with VW and Podpoint. I don't know the details but it's basically a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous power demands of the supermarkets themselves plus many Tesco stores are covered in solar panels so it genuinely is free at times.

The thing that strikes me is that many millions of pounds have been spent on the installation of charging points with much of this on unnecessary complexity in terms of administration and monitoring etc. In the majority of cases (for single phase AC EVSEs) it would have been cheaper to install the most basic (but robust) charging points and simply given the energy away for their entire usable lifetime.

Instead of benefitting the EV drivers, most of these chargers remain completely redundant as they are priced (out of necessity) far too high for anyone to actually use.

In my opinion, it should be mandatory for every new commercial parking space to provide completely free 3.6kW charging, paid for by whatever business is making profit from people parking there - i.e. supermarkets make money from us driving to them, as do office buildings etc.

silvercar

I can understand the attraction for Tesco, as people will only stay a short while and it's obviously a way of encouraging shoppers. As far as the stations go, the expectation is that commuters will leave their car there all day and I can't see it attracting EV drivers.

Grumpy_chap

Petriix said:

In my opinion, it should be mandatory for every new commercial parking space to provide completely free 3.6kW charging, paid for by whatever business is making profit from people parking there - i.e. supermarkets make money from us driving to them, as do office buildings etc.

In the olden days, car parking was free at shopping centres and the like and when they started to introduce parking charges, my Dad made exactly the argument that the parking should be free so as not to drive customers away.

Your comment relating to the provision of free EV charging seems to be a modern update on the same subject.

While I won't disagree with you, I don't see why the argument will be any more successful now than it was when shopping centres went from free to paid parking.