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NETWORK / 14 / SEPTEMBER 2019 ELECTRIC VEHICLES Accelerating the EV revolution Matthew Boulton, chief commercial officer at Pivot Power, discusses how the company is working at a local level to speed up the decarbonisation of transport. C lean air day quietly came and went this summer, buried in political drama. It's over a year since air quality in the UK was declared "unlawful" yet the public health crisis continues. Poor air quality, due in large part to vehicle emissions in cit - ies, causes an estimated 40,000 premature deaths each year in the UK. Forty million people in the 115 largest cities in the EU are exposed to air exceeding WHO air quality guideline val- ues for at least one pollutant. The electrification of trans- port is a powerful lever for reducing local pollution levels, whilst also contributing to our national climate change targets. However, when councils were requested to declare their EV charging infrastructure plans in March this year, 107 out of 301 respondents said they had no plan to increase the number of charging points. 122 councils had a plan in place to increase the number, and 62 said they were taking steps to increase the number without having a formal plan to do so. Eight said they had no appropriate locations for installing new charging points and around 60 councils failed to respond. Why is progress so disjointed? When it comes to local authority plans for infrastructure, local is the word to have front of mind. Every region is different, and the challenges faced are disparate – the situation in rural vs urban areas for instance is like chalk and cheese. In rural areas, concerns sur - rounding cost and utilisation makes it easy to build a con- sensus against investment that, by dint of its novelty, is o"en perceived as risky. Faced with squeezed budgets, short-term reasons for not pushing ahead with EV infrastructure can drown out mid-term thinking that could draw very different conclusions when it comes to return on investment. While some locations have a capacity glut le" over from industrial days, there o"en sim - ply isn't enough copper in the ground to support substantial EV charging. The current high power chargers are rated at up to 350kW. In many cases this is equal to the capacity a large su - permarket is allocated to use at any one time. It would take just one car charging on a 350kW charger and the supermarket would be le" with nothing for running the rest of its entire site. These barriers beg the ques - tion: can there be a single road to zero that fits the bill across hundreds of diverse towns, cit- ies and hamlets? Many roads to zero When facing these challenges, one-word springs to mind; "flex- ibility". In order to fit together