Scotland’s Electric Vehicle Charging Points

At the end of 2020, Transport Scotland published the National Transport Strategy (NTS2) – Delivery Plan – 2020 to 2022. Two of the actions in the plan are to:

“support households and businesses to make the switch to zero emission vehicles”

and

“support strategically coordinated investment in the charging network”

Leading on from the 2013 Switched On Scotland: A Roadmap to Widespread Adoption of Plug-in Vehicles and its review in 2016, the actions include continuation of the Low Carbon Transport Loan (LCTL) and the domestic and business charge point programmes.

The plan will expand and improve on the ChargePlace Scotland network to more than 2000 charging points by April 2022 (in addition to what other networks have planned). Progress toward this goal was recently announced with now over 1500 publicly available electric vehicle charge points in Scotland.

Charging point data

In looking for data on Scotland’s charging points, web maps are available i.e. Live Map, Open Charge Map and Zap Map. In terms of data available for download, none was found to be available from ChargePlace Scotland or Scottish Government.

However, the following data was found to be available:

– 868 Scottish public charging points from the UK National Chargepoint Registry (NCR)

– 2038 Scottish public charging points at council level from the UK Department of Transport as part of the Electric vehicle charging device statistics.

– 2134 Scottish public and private charging points as part of the global database at Open Charge Map (including API access).

Using the UK Department of Transport data, the map below shows the number of Scotland’s electric charge points by council as of October 2020.

The map below shows the distribution of rapid charging points only.