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In September, the UK’s largest electric vehicle charging hub opened at the NEC conference centre in Birmingham. The hub is located close to major transport locations in the Midlands and boasting 180 charging spaces.
Visitors to the NEC’s events, including the Commercial Vehicle Show, can now park up in one of the 180 charging spaces to charge their cars while they attend the exhibition. For a longer charge, there are 150 seven-kilowatt AC charging bays, or for drivers in a rush there are 30 superfast, 300kW DC charging bays which can charge up a typical passenger vehicle in as little as 15 minutes.
150 7kW AC charging bays30 300kW DC superfast charging bays |
The multi-million pound site is the largest ever private investment in a UK electric project to date, built by the NEC, EV Network and bp pulse. They anticipate ever growing consumer need for electric vehicle charging stations, so they have placed the hub strategically at the heart of the midlands transport network. The M42, M6 and A45 are all easily accessible from the hub, and in the future the HS2 interchange station will also be within a short distance.
Andrew Cole, a director at the NEC Group, said the conference centre’s campus, which has 7 million visitors a year, could now charge about 1,000 electric cars in every 12-hour day. But surely this would overload the grid?
Reza Shaybani, the co-founder and chief executive of EV Network, warned that the UK’s existing grid infrastructure was “a key bottleneck in developing future robust infrastructure for fast charging”.
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“This is why sites like [the Birmingham NEC] are all about the grid connection and their vicinity to electrical infrastructure,” “We’re envisaging a situation where 30 cars turn up at the same time and draw maximum power. The site is designed in such a way that if all the sockets are in use at the same time the grid can cope with providing enough power for everybody.” |
The site supports the government’s electric vehicle infrastructure strategy and commitment to decarbonising transport, backed with more than £2 billion to support the transition to zero emission vehicles including accelerating the rollout of chargepoint infrastructure.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, who opened the hub on the 7th September, said:
“This is the biggest private investment in electric charging in the UK and is a huge vote of confidence in Britain’s role as a leader in green industries. The ground-breaking site will be a major transport hub for the future and marks a significant step in our rollout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the country.”
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