EV Infrastructure Strategy - enough to unlock the required investment?

The UK Government strategy paper expects a minimum of 300,000 public chargepoints will be required by 2030 (up from the current 30,000). However, the paper notes that the estimated chargepoint requirement is inherently uncertain and could be as high as 700,000 public chargepoints by 2030.

Whilst there is welcome news on further financial support for this infrastructure roll-out, there is a lack of detail on how the current commercial deployment challenges can be overcome to quickly unlock the necessary private capital investment . Also, there is a lack of detail on how the government expects such investment to achieve a reasonable rate of return whilst ensuring affordability for end users. 

The paper sets out additional requirements on EV charging infrastructure's functionality and reliability, which will be subject to new regulations expected later in 2022 and 2023. Until the detail of these regulations is released, we do not know whether the requirements will apply to existing infrastructure or not. If they do apply to existing infrastructure, this could result in more capital investment being diverted into upgrading or replacing existing infrastructure in the short term. 

As a result, there still appear to be a number of challenges to meet the envisaged minimum requirement of public chargepoints within the necessary timeframe to facilitate the mass adoption of electric vehicles.