Over £125,000 in grants have been issued to Isle of Wight residents to go towards the cost of installing electric vehicle charging points at the their properties, according to new data.
The South East had the highest demand for electric car home charging grants, according to figures from the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles, with the Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme’s (EVHS) uptake in the South East recorded as 735 grants per 100,000 homes last year, double the rate of many other areas, including London, Northern Ireland and Wales.
Almost 8,000 South East electric vehicle owners took advantage of the scheme in 2020, a 48% increase on 2019, and the highest number since the scheme was launched in 2014. On the Island, £22,700 was handed out last year – £200 more than in 2019.
The Island saw the highest uptake in the EVHS, which provides 75% of the cost of installing electric vehicle devices at domestic properties, in 2014 – with 234 charging devices installed in total between 2014 and 2020.
Across the country, over 42,000 grants for home charging devices were made last year, worth nearly £17m, which was over a quarter of the value of grants made since EVHS started.
The figures are hot on the heels of last week’s news, showing new electric vehicle registrations rocketed in 2020, hitting 87% growth for alternative fuel vehicles. Total vehicle registrations dropped 27% during 2020, with diesel vehicles being particularly badly hit, down 51%.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in November that wholly powered petrol and diesel cars will no longer be sold in the UK from 2030 as part of the ‘green industrial revolution’ to tackle climate change. Johnson says the government plans to ‘invest more than £2.8 billion in electric vehicles, lacing the land with charging points’.
Greg Wilson, the Founder of Quotezone.co.uk, which provides insurance quotes to electric car owners and compiled the figures, says:
“Easy access to recharging points is crucial to meeting the government’s ambitious targets for electric vehicle use, but there is much work to do to meet these government plans. Research suggests that an investment of £16.7bn is needed on the public charging infrastructure alone – excluding local grid network updates.
“While grant funding take-up for charging devices shot up last year, it will need to increase even more in order to ensure that more than two million new vehicles sold each year can access electric charging points as the 2030 deadline draws closer.”
How about an incentive, extra cash, for petrol car owners to trade in there cars for electric vehicles, not everyone can afford an electric car yet.
What will happen in 2030
Will all non electric vehicles be banned from Roads?
The sale of what are described as mainstream petrol and diesel cars is being stopped in the UK in 2030, petrol/diesel hybrids 5 years later. The life of a modern car can be 15/20 years, so nothing is going to change much. It may give time for manufacturers to come up with something fit for purpose, rather than technology from the edwardian era, range and weight was a problem with electrics then, and it still is, plus the massive enviromental build to scrap pollution of electric vehicles will cause much more of a problem globally.
The ban only applies to new vehicle sales. Not existing .
The rich will get what they want, the plebs on buses, or beryl scooters, giving THEM clear roads, to roar past the rest of us.
Same with hols, they will still jet off to foreign lands for wonderful hols, whilst we go back to windbreaks and bucket and spade hols at home.
The working class were infringing on the well to do’s way of life too much, so it had to end.
F’n hell Jerry, why not go into politics? I will vote for you! (Hopefully see you in 10 years time at Trafalgar Square, for the future rioting),
Roll the days of electric cars and power cuts early evening when everyone comes home and plugs in!
Once again, money goes to money! I expect half of the recipients of said grants are resident here for a small part of the year, and the electric car is their fashionable hollibobs runaround. Wouldn’t want to ruin the Audi or the BMW on our rustic highways…
That’s what’s wrong with this country,the rich get richer and the poorer pay tax to help. I could hardly afford a couple of thousand for a car every few years,yet they can pay upwards of £30,0000 no road tax etc but tax payers pay for their personal charging point on their nice driveway. Give grants and scrappage to the working class and I might have one. But don’t forget how they get Lithium in 1st place,these cars will only be green if keep going for 20yrs.
How about a grant to get more diesel for my car?
A nice new electric car is fine, but how long before the battery starts to degrade and you find yourself having to recharge it more often? It’s common enough with mobile phones and laptops. A car battery will be doing more work so expect the same to happen. A diesel car 20+ years, a battery driven car ?????