UK National Grid plans superfast country-wide EV charging network
Range anxiety could soon be a thing of the past for electric vehicle drivers in the UK, as National Grid is proposing a network of superfast charging points that would mean 90 percent of motorists would always be within 50 miles of a charging station. The strategically-placed points would offer up to 350KW of power, drawn directly from the country's high-voltage power grid, which is managed by the company, and could charge a car in between five and 12 minutes -- much faster than the 20 to 40 minutes it currently takes . The proposal covers 100 motorway-adjacent chargers, equating to around 35MW of electricity -- enough to power 14,000 homes. According to National Grid estimates, the infrastructure required to get the fleet up and running would cost between £500 million and £1 billion, or just 60p per driver per year. "If you overlay the motorway network over the electricity transmission network, there is a synergy," says Graeme Cooper, project director for electric ...