EV Charging on the Doorstop: A vision for sharing our home’s electricity supply

There is a much-discussed challenge in the UK’s transition to private electric vehicles: the 30% or so of the UK population who does not have off-street parking and consequently no ability to charge their vehicles whilst parked on their driveway.  

And this is a problem not only for convenience – forcing people to charge at charging hubs or at destinations – but also of price. The cheapest price for charging one’s car is typically the rates offered through the domestic electricity tariff. For instance, Octopus Energy offer an overnight rate of 9 pence per KWh versus a typical rate of 56 p/kWh for Slow/Fast and 80p/kWh for Rapid. So that’s a increase of over 500% if you don’t have off-street parking. 

The pavements across the UK show the workarounds to this problem. Homeowners who park outside their houses are laying cables across the pavements, often using rubber matting to protect the cable and reduce the danger of tripping. However, local highway authorities have mixed guidance on the legality of these solutions and there will always be concerns about the obstruction these cables pose, especially if used by every house. 

There are some solutions to this problem of charging in residential streets: lampposts can be equipped with charge points or bollards inserted into the pavement, which can be raised or lowered as needed. However, lampposts are not often on the right side of the pavement – if set back from the kerb they would involve trailing cables across the walkway – and the bollards are relative expensive. We have not yet discovered a cost-effective and common solution to the problem. 

However, new products are coming onto the market to solve these issues and enable those without off-street parking to connect to their domestic electricity network. Kerbocharge, as seen on the Dragon’s Den recently, is one solution (and there are others such as Gul-e) which consists of a ‘self-closing’ channel across the pavement between house and road, allowing the charging cable to secured under the level of the pavement out of the way of feet and the wheels of wheelchairs and buggies.

But the ability to connect to one’s home electricity network has an obvious drawback: what if you can’t park outside of your house? For most people in busy UK cities, this is a familiar problem with the constant searching and hoping for a spot near one’s house. And it’s quite a sensitive problem: parking 2 metres from the ‘channel’ doesn’t necessarily allow you to run the cable from car to house – you need to be right next to it. So whilst the use of channels to extend the domestic network is a good idea, it’s not yet a complete solution to the problem. 

But what if you could make a virtue out of a necessity?

In this case the necessity is ending up outside your neighbour’s channel and charger. There are currently solutions to allow you to share your charger. For instance, Co-Charger’s digital platform allows ‘hosts’ to rent out their chargers to others for a fee. The payment is done by way of photographs of the vehicles battery level rather than any measurement of electricity at the meter and the system uses a booking system. UK energy regulations do not allow individuals to sell on energy so the payment is for parking rather than energy.  But this system is arguably best suited to regular pre-booked sessions at a particular changepoint rather than a real-time system which allows the user to plug into a charger wherever they park on the street. To solve this residential charging challenge we need to a more dynamic arrangement which allows users to quickly connect to a range of available chargers on their street. 

So how might a more dynamic system work? On the technology side, the charger needs to speak to the house’s Smart Meter so EV charging is identifiable as a discrete electrical load. Chargers would need some form of identification, such as a barcode, to be used to initiate the session. Users would need to be registered on a digital platform, holding payment details, and all energy providers would need to be able to collect the charging fees and credit the hosts’ energy account with the fees. For this to happen, there would probably be the need for changes to energy regulations to allow a domestic energy account to pass charges through in this way. 

And there might be some added benefits of this arrangement for the wider energy system: those with solar generation and batteries might be keen to export their excess energy to others. And this network of attached energy storage, held within the battery of the EV, could eventually be used in a more dynamic way to balance energy fluctuations throughout the day and night and help realise the UK’s ‘smart grid’ energy ambitions. 

There are undoubtedly challenges to this vision: local authorities need to give the green light to the installation of these channels. Households need to be convinced of the benefits and be comfortable with someone stepping through the front gate to attach the charger, and pavements will need to be kept free of cables through tidy use of the technology. But the advantage of this solution is its home-grown nature: it doesn’t rely on local authorities or changepoint operators to install large numbers of chargers on the street – interventions they are unlikely to do any time soon. It could be a residents association can galvanise current and future EV drivers on a street to become their own changepoint operators and install a network of chargers themselves.