Charge Collective is a Network Innovation Allowance (NIA) project run by UK Power Networks which aims to design and trial an intervention to enable investment in residential on-street charging infrastructure for EVs.

The intervention is led by distribution network operators (DNOs) working together with Local Authorities and consists of two steps:

• selecting areas where the risk of market under-delivering is high and where investment could enable greater EV-take up; and
• Local Authorities tendering the identified areas to chargepoint providers who as part of their bid submit the amount of connection charges they are willing to cover, the residual being offered as a subsidy by UK Power Networks.

As part of the project, Frontier Economics was commissioned by UK Power Networks to develop the methodology for choosing socially optimal chargepoint locations and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of delivering chargepoints in a coordinated way, rather than incrementally over time. The results of this work have now been published and are available here. 

Frontier Economics continues to be involved in the second part of the Charge Collective project which focuses on designing a tender to competitively allocate a discount on connection charges to chargepoint investors. The learnings from this part of the project will be published in the future.

Frontier Economics has previously undertaken work for UK Power Networks to identify market and policy failures that lead to under-provision of public charging infrastructure for EVs. You can read more about this research here.

Frontier regularly advises on the energy sector.

For more information, please contact us on media@frontier-economics.com or at +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.