A common enough question around the Charging Network is where are the next chargers going to go? Well, we track the Infrastructure that has a Planning Application attached to it on our Infrastructure Updates page, but what about the plans coming behind that? What about the government's plans and what has been announced by ZEVI?
We wanted to keep things simple in showing you the "what and where" of chargers that will be coming to the country through the investments via ZEVI's Shared Ireland Sports scheme and the LDV National Road Grant Schemes (particularly Phase 1 and 2 for now).
If you haven't seen the "ZEVI EV Recharging Infrastructure LDV National Road Grant Scheme" before well don't worry, we don't expect many to know about it. To keep it simple, this is government investment in the EV recharging network over phased funding stages so that it isn't one large pot to pull from, and to keep the plans for each consistent. The first map below covers these two phases.
Phase 1 focuses on our Motorway network covering 17 locations, with 131 high-powered charge points adding an additional 24,260kW (or 24MW) of charging, about 8x plugs per site at over 150kW per plug on average. It is important to note that there is a Round 2 for Phase 1, notably for the M4, M8 & M17 where more locations are being sought. So this total pool is going to increase once those are announced.
Phase 2 focuses on our National single carriageway roads covering 53 locations, for a total of 175 plugs to add an additional 20,000kW (or 20MW) of charging, a little over 3x plugs per site at just over 100kW per plug on average.
Well, no. ZEVI has also announced Phase 3 of the National Road Grant Scheme. Phase 3 is still open for consultation, so we don't have details on these exact locations, but these locations are on "the rest" of our National single carriageway roads. Importantly these are the roads along the West coast of Ireland that are poorly served, as well as roads between smaller towns and villages. These will have pools of charging of at least 100kW (think of a Dual charger unit) with a maximum distance of 30kms between charging pools. These will be vital for supporting communities and those who travel around the country anywhere off the main routes.
Moving on to the "Shared Island Sports Club EV Charging Scheme" mentioned earlier, this scheme aims to deliver charging to over 220 sites across all of Ireland, i.e. The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Most of these will be single DC units, probably of 50kW, but great to have in local locations and around our sporting facilities and for a whole island approach to charging and once again, supporting local communities in allowing an EV transition to become that bit easier.
Ok, firstly a word of warning. We have done the best we can to get this right, but we could have something wrong. If you do spot something wrong, just let us know! But this should be the sites we start to see coming through in the next few months for planning applications (although maybe not all, as we hope the planning exemption consultations will remove the requirement for many of these to actually have any planning permission requirements and to be simply exempted developments). But click on the maps, move around and see what's local to you, or where you might be travelling to and get an idea as to what is coming!
Key: Blue is for ZEVI's LDV Phase 1, Orange is for Phase 2.
Key: Green is the Shared Island Sports Club EV Charging Scheme.