The council says supply is finally ahead of demand on most streets.

The number of public electric vehicle charging points in Calder has more than doubled in twelve months, from 1,140 last October to 2,385 this autumn, according to figures published by the city council on Thursday. For the first time, the council says, the supply of chargers has overtaken demand on most residential streets.

The growth has been driven largely by kerbside chargers built into lamp posts and small bollards along terraced streets where residents have no driveway. More than 900 of the new points are of that type, installed under a contract the council signed with an infrastructure firm last year. The remainder are faster chargers in car parks, supermarkets and at a new hub beside the ring road.

Where the chargers went

Officials say they deliberately concentrated the first wave of lamp-post chargers in neighbourhoods with the most on-street parking. In the inner districts of the old town and along the canal, where more than four in five homes lack off-street parking, almost every street now has at least one charger within 200 metres.

  • Lamp-post and bollard chargers (7kW): 1,610, up from 680
  • Fast chargers (22kW) in car parks: 520, up from 340
  • Rapid chargers (50kW and above): 255, up from 120

The council’s own monitoring suggests that most of the slower chargers are in use for less than a third of the day, a figure it takes as a sign that capacity is now ahead of demand. Last autumn, by contrast, some streets in the old town had a single charger serving a dozen electric cars, and residents complained of queues and arguments over who had left a fully charged car plugged in overnight.

“A year ago people were asking whether they could get an electric car without a driveway. In most of the city, the answer now is yes,” said Councillor Rosalind Fairweather, the council’s cabinet member for transport and energy. “That was the barrier we heard about more than any other.”

The gaps that remain

The picture is less rosy outside the city centre. In the hill villages and the valley around Ardle, public chargers remain sparse, and drivers say rapid chargers on the main routes into Calder are often busy at weekends. The regional motoring association counted just fourteen rapid chargers between Calder and Port Selwyn, a distance of around forty miles.

Rural councillors have called on the Assembly to fund a programme for smaller communities, where commercial operators see little profit in installing chargers. The two independent members representing the hill towns raised the issue in the chamber last month, arguing that country drivers were being asked to give up petrol cars without the infrastructure to replace them.

Reliability is another concern. A survey of 600 electric car owners in the region, carried out by a drivers’ group in September, found that one in eight had arrived at a public charger in the past month to find it out of order. The council says its contract requires faults on kerbside chargers to be repaired within 72 hours, and that it can impose penalties when that target is missed.

Price and the grid

Cost remains the main complaint from drivers who rely on public points. Charging at a lamp post costs 49p per kilowatt hour, roughly twice the price of charging at home on an overnight tariff. Campaigners argue that this penalises people in flats and terraces, who are often on lower incomes than those with driveways.

Engineers at the regional grid operator say the network has coped well with the extra demand so far, partly because most kerbside charging happens overnight when other demand is low. But Priyanka Delacroix, a network planning manager at the operator, warned that some older substations in the old town would need upgrading if electric car ownership continued to grow at its current pace. “We are fine for the next few years,” she said. “After that, the street-by-street planning really matters.”

The council plans to install a further 800 chargers next year, with a third of them reserved for areas outside the city centre. It will also trial a scheme allowing residents to request a charger on their street through an online form, with installation promised within six months where the street is suitable.