£70m charging pilot ends with no funding awarded

The Rapid Charging Fund pilot was launched in December 2023 ahead of the proposed £950 million wider fund. It was designed to test capital grants for electricity-network capacity at motorway sites in England where the cost of major grid upgrades could prevent private investment in ultra-rapid charging. Frontier Economics and SYSTRA evaluated the pilot using stakeholder interviews and document review covering the programme through January 2025.

Operators wanted more charging, but not the risk profile

The evaluation does not describe motorway service-area operators as uninterested in EV charging. On the contrary, operators interviewed saw charging as strategically important and had active plans to expand provision. The problem was the scale, timing and allocation of risk associated with future-proofing the electricity infrastructure behind those chargers.

The pilot sought proposals capable of meeting demand to at least 2035 and allowed upgrades to be designed for 2050 demand. The report contrasts that with normal motorway service-area investment planning, where operators typically make more incremental decisions over horizons of around three to five years. Committing significant capital well ahead of proven utilisation therefore created a mismatch between public-policy timescales and normal commercial investment practice.

Grant funding did not remove the delivery risks

Applicants also raised concerns about the proposed Grant Funding Agreement. Clawback provisions could leave an operator exposed if delivery slipped, including where a delay was caused by a DNO, while increases in delivery costs could ultimately be borne by the applicant unless government agreed a variation.

The evaluation records a wider set of barriers: limited internal project-management capacity within some motorway operators; a requirement for at least two open-access CPOs at funded sites; DNO connection processes that could extend beyond the pilot timetable; staged payments made before infrastructure was energised; and the long lag between paying for reinforcement and earning a return from the resulting capacity.

Physical sites created another constraint. New electrical routes can require wayleaves across privately owned land, while charging bays can consume more space than conventional parking. At motorway service areas that must maintain minimum parking provision and may have little room to expand, grid infrastructure and charging hardware cannot be considered separately from land and parking design.

The report questions where public intervention should sit

A recurring suggestion from motorway operators was that support for power infrastructure could, where feasible, be directed to DNOs or other parties that own or manage the network assets rather than routed through the motorway operator. Under the pilot, the operator would receive the grant but then pay the network company that was actually delivering the connection works, leaving delivery risk with the intermediary.

The evaluation does not present direct DNO funding as a settled government policy. It records it as an industry proposal for future consideration. But the reasoning is important: its preliminary findings indicate that motorway operators generally have a commercial incentive to install chargers when power is available, suggesting that electricity-network capacity may be a more binding constraint than appetite to deploy EVSE.

The lesson extends beyond motorway passenger charging

The outcome is more significant than an underspent grant scheme. It shows that grant support does not automatically make a multi-megawatt charging project investable if the recipient still carries connection delay, cost escalation, utilisation uncertainty, land risk and a long period before the new capacity generates revenue.

Those issues become more important as motorway hubs move towards larger banks of 300–400 kW chargers and as heavy-duty charging introduces multi-megawatt site loads and MCS infrastructure. The central planning problem is increasingly not just how many chargers can be funded, but who should finance and carry the risk of grid capacity that may be needed a decade or more before demand fully develops.

The evaluation was commissioned to inform future policy design. It should not be read as evidence that the wider Rapid Charging Fund will necessarily use the same structure or that direct network funding has already been adopted.