A month has passed since it was reported that nearly a third of Source London charging points were out of action and unfortunately there has been little to no progress.
The public charging network is still flagging many of it’s charging stations as temporarily unavailable and it seems that neither IER or the charge point manufacturers are willing to take responsibility.
This is extremely disappointing news considering the encouraging progress being made in the electric vehicle market elsewhere; OLEV recently recorded the best ever sales period for EVs over the past 3 months.
EV drivers will be frustrated to learn that a blame game between IER and the networks partners has led to a stalemate, meaning that the points are not likely to be fixed in the short-term.
Source London claims it currently has no jurisdiction to repair broken points, because maintenance is the responsibility of charger manufacturers, some of whom are not cooperating.
However, this has been rivalled by POD Point and Chargemaster two of the main manufactures involved.
Pod Point chief executive Erik Fairbairn said: “As part of the purchase of Source London, Bolloré [IER] purchased a commitment to fund maintenance agreements of every charge point in the Source London network. We have not yet seen evidence of them doing that.”
Transport for London, who sold the network for £1 million to IER, was not able to shed much light on who was responsible when asked, stating that “Enforcement of these [maintenance] contracts remains the responsibility of the individual consortium partners”.
Source London has eluded to the boroughs unwillingness to cooperate, saying they have restricted access to broken charging points, “Importantly, to achieve any of our goals, we need to reach an agreement with the boroughs giving us the power to work on their infrastructure or replace it when needed”.
With IER being a charge point manufacturer themselves and already making it’s intentions clear to expand the network on their own terms, there is much speculation to suggest they themselves are not motivated to repair the current infrastructure.
It appears that the complicated framework that Source London currently lives within has also had a lot to do with with the lack of forward momentum; the network has 66 “scheme partners”.
In a recent statement, an IER spokesman said “We sadly came to realise that the network contained many faulty or obsolete charge points, we may therefore have to replace some of the existing points with our own.”
There is no doubt that this is a massive blow to the to advancement of the electric vehicle market. Source London is by far the largest regional public charging network with nearly 1500 charging points.
This being said charging infrastructure in the UK is continually expanding with over 7000 points available nationwide and there are also incentives set up to get a free charge point installed at your house. To view all public charging points in the UK go to Zap-Map Live or for more details on domestic charging go to the Charging at Home page.
The Telegraph
