When The Hippy (Dale Vince) set up the Electric Highway more than 10 years ago using money from Nissan, no-one else was interested. By last year EV drivers were complaining that Electric Highway chargers usually didn’t work & that there was usually a lack of CCS, & that there was a massive problem as other companies couldn’t set up EV chargers on these sites.
Fast forward to this year, the Electric Highway partnered with Gridserve to get some of the chargers replaced, & then Gridserve bought out Ecotricity from the Electric Highway. Gridserve aims to replace ALL the old chargers by end of September & are moving very quickly to do so. Also Gridserve want to increase the numbers of chargers on these sites, but are restricted at almost all of them by the lack of electricity infrastructure to be able to supply all these extra chargers, so they are trying to get extra supply.
Gridserve have also promised to build over 10 new hubs before year end, the first is the Braintree HQ, then Rugby services that has lots of chargers installed, Gatwick South Terminal, Cornwall Gridserve Hub, etc.
I think the CMA is picking up from the complaints from when The Hippy was not really running things rather than the recent Gridserve developments, but all the same, if we need 10 times the current number of chargers bu 2030 then they will need new sites with better electrical supplies than the existing MSAs (Motorway Service Areas).
Looking at Toddington Services recently I noticed that there is a decent potential supply fairly close to the northbound side (Sundon NG Substation which I believe supplies Aylesbury & Luton).