(LONDON) The British government, under pressure for months from the auto industry to speed up the rollout of charging stations for electric vehicles, announced on Thursday the provision of 1.6 billion pounds (2.6 billion Cdn dollars) to reach 300,000 public charging points by 2030.
Posted at 6:35 p.m.
This sum corresponds to amounts already announced, in particular in the annual budget of last October, for the development of electric vehicles, but they are now allocated to the acceleration of the deployment of charging stations, a door told AFP. -word of the Ministry of Transport.
The UK has set a 2030 ban on sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles in the country.
The government intends to “increase” the number of charging points tenfold, in particular by stimulating projects by local authorities and private actors, and wants to “reach around 300,000 public terminals by 2030” in the country, that is to say to say “about five times the number of gas pumps on our roads today”, argued the executive in a press release.
A fund of 950 million pounds (1.6 billion CAN) will be used in particular for the deployment of at least “6000 ultra-fast and high-power charging stations on English motorways by 2035”, specifies the press release from the government.
In parallel with these public funds, the government is announcing an investment by the British oil giant BP of one billion pounds in “ultra-fast” charging equipment, while the company had already announced its intention to increase its investments in the low carbon energy.
London had said in November that the installation of an electric vehicle charging point would be compulsory in the UK in new construction and as part of “major renovations” from this year.
The government had said it hoped that 145,000 new charging points would be created each year thanks to this new regulation.
The ratio between public charging stations and electric vehicles deteriorated last year, the automotive industry association SMMT said on Wednesday.
It has gone from one terminal for 16 vehicles to one for 32, in the face of the increase in sales of this type of vehicle, according to the association, which calls on the government as well as private operators to work twice as hard.