Prof Andy Cruden, University of Southampton

A recent article in the Times/Sunday Times (‘We spent £1m on electric chargers — but we don’t have the power to use them’) has raised fresh concerns regarding the ability of the UK electricity grid to provide the necessary electrical capacity to supply the rapid growth in public EV charging stations.

The article highlighted the issues faced by Moto, the major UK service station operator, that has invested heavily in new EV charging station facilities only to be frustrated with continuing delays and issues securing the necessary electrical grid connections to supply the chargers themselves.

The NationalGrid company have stated:

i) peak electricity demand has reduced from 62 GW[1] in 2002 to some 48.6 GW[2] in 2022, due to improvements in energy efficiency;

ii) UK de-rated generation capacity[3] has also stayed broadly steady from ~75 GW in 2002[4] to 76.7 GW in 20222, even as the mix of technologies and renewable energy capacity has grown.

Hence the grid appears to be in robust health with a growing capacity margin (the difference between generation capacity and peak demand). However actually achieving a connection to the grid is fraught with difficulties, and operates on a ‘first come first served basis’. Recent reports have highlighted there is a 200 GW queue of grid connection requests, with some projects experiencing severe delays and potential costs: “One big car manufacturer hoping to cut emissions from its factory by connecting a 5MW solar array to its site has been told they would need to wait until 2031, and would need to pay a £9m connection fee”[5].

Ultimately there is no real need to grid connect ‘new’ loads, such as EV charging or future heat pumps, if a robust and cost-effective solution to supporting off-grid energy supplies can be found.

For EV charging the FEVER research project (www.fever-ev.ac.uk) is focussed on decoupling EV charging demand from the UK electricity grid, by enabling 100% renewable energy to be used via a novel hybrid energy store, located at the FEVER charging station. This hybrid ‘Off Vehicle Energy Store’ (OVES) acts as the buffer between stochastic renewable energy generation and regular EV charging demand, and focusses on integrating low cost, sustainable forms of electrical energy storage into an unique OVES system.

The FEVER project is developing both the design methodology and the hybrid energy storage technology to deliver large scale off-grid EV charging stations, and believe this solution will enable projects to be delivered much more quickly by removing the need to request, pay for and utilise a grid connection.

The 5 year FEVER project is led by the University of Southampton, with the Universities of Sheffield, Surrey and Portsmouth, and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant ref: EP/W005883/1.