4 September (Part 2) - Green but very mean
I was thinking of driving around Bexley to see if there has been any progress towards the Council’s
planned installation of 13 electric charging points but today I have been saved the trouble.
Bexley Council
has issued a Press Release on the subject and it is clear that they have yet to make a start.
Their
13 charging points is fewer than half what can be found off Bugsby Way in
Greenwich alone but they are not the same. Bexley’s are to be provided by a
company called ChargeMaster with every indication that they will cost plenty. In
Greenwich they are free to use.
The more popular Electric Vehicles become the more the industry is showing
signs of becoming a rip off. The electric car I bought a year ago is now £5,000
more expensive which makes it a candidate for George Osborne’s iniquitous Luxury Car Tax.
A year ago the most expensive public charging was 25 pence per kilowatt hour
with many being free and now it is 39 pence almost everywhere. That makes it
more expensive to run an EV than it was to run my old petrol engined runabout.
In practice it is not as bad as that sounds for the many people who can charge
overnight on an Economy tariff but the situation is getting to be silly
especially when so many of the chargers at Motorway Service Areas are out of order
and do not work on newer cars.
Sooner or later the government will want to recoup the lost fuel duty revenues; but back to the present.
Except where there are large banks of charging points it is almost the norm to
find the charging bays ICEd, which is short hand for them being occupied by
Internal Combustion Engine cars or EVs which are not charging.
Just for once I hope that Bexley’s Parking Enforcement teams are out in force
handing out Penalty Charge Notices.
Motorists can be a selfish bunch and the picture shows the remains of a charging
plug lazily not replaced in its holster in a Bexley store’s car park. Then
someone ran over it; the voltage and maximum wattage available are most certainly lethal.
Fortunately the charging points chosen by Bexley Council require motorists to
bring their own cable so maybe they will be a little more careful than they are
with the more powerful tethered cable units.
Proposed locations. Bellegrove Road, Danson Lane, Sherwood Park Avenue,
St.John’s Road (Welling). Blackfen Parade. Walnut Tree Road and Erith Road
(Erith). Methuen Road and Sandford Road (Bexleyheath). Nuxley Road and Picardy
Street (Belvedere). The Oval (Sidcup) and Crayford Waterside.