Construction of EV-Only ‘Filling’ Station Commences in the UK

Construction work has started on an Electric Vehicle (EV) only charging forecourt capable of ‘filling’ 24 vehicles at once. The location is to the East of London in the county of Essex, at a place called Great Notley, and is owned by a company called Gridserve, who have plans to create more than 100 of the same across the UK.

Gridserve hopes that the roadside recharging forecourt will solve the thorny issue of where to recharge your car and banish the scourge of range anxiety to the history books. Well, not sure about that, as to get a 70% charge it will still take you about 40 minutes, so I hope that they will be serving good coffee.

The forecourt is due to have solar power capability to try and achieve an as near as possible zero-carbon future and will be opened sometime in the summer. Now, all of you who have experienced the British weather, in particular the summer, may doubt that the solar panels will help achieve the zero-carbon future, but just off the coast of Essex are masses of wind farms that contributed to the UK running the electric grid without fossil fuel last summer.

The switch to electric cars is being held back at least in part by range anxiety—to put it simply, there are not enough fit for purpose charging stations around the UK and no end of government incentives have persuaded the population to convert over to ‘green’ technology. The sad fact is that the charging station at Great Notley, which will take up over 2.5 acres of land, is being built with the aid of a GBP4.86 million grant from the government, without which it would not have been a viable proposition.