Introduction

As part of London’s mission to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality the city is supporting a transition to Electric Vehicles (EV) through the deployment of Charge Point Infrastructure. To support this work LOTI, GLA, TfL and London Councils have developed a tool that brings together data on London’s EV charge points to inform the strategic deployment of new infrastructure. The first iteration went live in 2020 and was updated at the end of 2023 . This blog recaps the reason why the dashboard was created and sets out the new functionality and features developed through 2023.

Why does London need an EV Charge Point Dashboard?

We decided to build an EV Charge point dashboard for London as a single source of information about charge point location and charge point utilisation didn’t exist. While data on the location of charge points is freely available, utilisation data is considered commercially sensitive by charge point operators and therefore not available on existing resources such as Zap Map. Utilisation data is critical for the public sector officers who are planning the future roll out of charge points and is required to create strategies to access funding to cover the cost of new infrastructure. Utilisation data helps officers understand areas where there is high demand so they can be prioritised in the future. To protect operators commercially sensitive data only London Borough, TfL and GLA officers are able to access our EV Charge Point Dashboard.

Creating the map also supported boroughs to come together with TfL to agree a standard for the data collected and reported by operators. This has helped to bring alignment in a previously fragmented infrastructure landscape that has been shaped by ad hoc projects.

One dashboard for London also reduces the reporting requirements for charge point operators. Instead of being required to send utilisation data to each borough where they operate they can provide data on all their London charge points in one API call to the London EV Dashboard.

Updating the Dashboard

With London’s roll out continuing at pace we have engaged with borough officers to learn about their evolving requirements as users and developed new functionality to match.

We held three user sessions starting with a large workshop with around 50 users from across the boroughs. Following the LOTI Data Projects Methodology, at the first workshops we discussed the outcomes for London that EV officers are trying to deliver and how the current EV Dashboard helped to inform their actions and strategies.

From here a smaller user group was formed with representatives from Barnet, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow, Kingston, Lewisham and Sutton. This group met to discuss new features and functionality that could be added to the dashboard to support their work in delivering EV infrastructure for London.

New Features and Functionality

With user requirements established the GLAs City Intelligence Unit iteratively built out the following new features and more:

1. More Historic Data

The previous version of the EV Charge Point Dashboard could only present one year’s worth of data. The new dashboard includes all data recorded since the launch of the project in 2020.

2. Trends  and Analysis

Borough officers told us that they needed charts and visualisations to include in internal reports and strategies. The new dashboard features a range of aggregate charts for each Borough as well as totals for London.

3. Improved User Interface

The map has a completely new look and feel making it easier to distinguish between operators, understand utilisation, power delivered and where charge point blocking is occurring frequently. Users can also see toggle to focus on slow, fast and rapid charges and show those that have never been used.

4. Walking Time to Charge Points

This contextual layer enables users to see addresses that are within a 1,3 or 5 minute walk of a charge point. This helps to identify areas without close access to charge points which can be prioritised for future roll out.

5. Electrical Substation Capacity

EV Charge point requires sufficient headroom in the local electrical substation therefore we have included open data from UKPN and SSEN to show areas where headroom is limited. This enables officers to have proactive conversations with the grid as part of their roll out plans.

6. Additional Contextual Layers

A number of data sets have been added to the mapping functionality to provide context. These include the estimated total number of cars (Census 2021), modelling for percentage of households with off-street parking (RAC Methodology + OS 2023 survey data) and LSOA and Ward boundaries.

What’s next

The current map now includes 17,500 charging points, and 5.7m charging events that have taken place since 2020. We are working with stakeholders to iteratively develop new features. The next feature is expected to be private hire and taxi driver data sourced from TfL. This will enable borough officers to design new infrastructure plans for overnight chargers in areas with high proportions of Taxi and Private Hire drivers.

New operators will continue to be onboarded to the map as part of future grant funding through the LEVI programme and through independent agreements directly with charge point operators.

We are also scoping the possibility of exchanging data with the GLA infrastructure mapping system to enhance coordination around ground works and energy supply and to minimise disruption to Londoners.

In addition to this we will be making iterative updates to the map as new feature requirements are identified.

Access the map 

If you are a borough, TfL or GLA officer that requires access to the dashboard please get in touch.