The restoration of the Stormont Assembly is good news for Northern Ireland and its people, but the 24-month break in action means politicians face a to-do list piled as high as Everest – and experts fear that accelerating EV infrastructure growth is somewhere down in the foothills.
While the number of rapid and ultra-rapid chargers in Northern Ireland has increased fivefold in the past 18 months, the country can still claim only to have around 100 in operation, the majority located in the north-east.
As of October 2023, Northern Ireland had the fewest 50kW-plus chargers in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 people, compared with an average of 13.3, and is home to just 1% of the UK's total number of public chargers.
Meanwhile, with only 40% of households having a driveway, home charging is for many people not an option.
Critics point to what they claim is six years of underinvestment in Northern Ireland's EV infrastructure, during which the progress the country initially made has been undermined by poor maintenance of chargers, high grid-connection fees and planning delays.
Throughout this the Assembly has endured a succession of suspensions, the latest only just resolved. As a result, the country has been unable to enact the UK's ZEV mandate, which compels car makers to sell more electric cars at the expense of ICE ones or face stiff penalties. Experts fear that without the ZEV mandate, adoption of EVs in Northern Ireland will falter.
The Department for Transport said that Northern Ireland will enact it when the Assembly is able to pass the required legislation. It added that in the interim, the country will retain an appropriately scaled version of the existing CO2 emissions regulation for new cars that will achieve the same result. However, at the end of last year, it was ruled that the country had no legal powers to do so.
In 2021, Northern Ireland's Department for Infrastructure (DfI) formed a task force with stakeholders in the EV sector to consider how to accelerate progress and the following year published a six-point action plan. However, by last November, only one point, paying to charge – the aim being to improve network use and encourage more providers to enter the market – had been completed when the country's Electricity Supply Board (ESB) ended a decade of free charging.
Taskforce stakeholders have been told that the DfI and other key departments, including Environment, lack the financial and staffing resources to progress the action plan – a problem blamed on the suspension of the Assembly.
Mark McCall, chairman of the Electric Vehicle Association Northern Ireland (EVANI), one of the taskforce stakeholders, said the industry needs a solution urgently.
"In the early days, we looked to the DfI to kick-start the market, but we've passed that now," he said. "We need action on things such as planning consent for a site with grid connection, which currently can take up to 11 months. Connection charges to the grid, ranging from £250,000 to £1 million, are the highest in the UK and need to be lower, too.
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