About the Project
Project PACE is a major project that has evolved from the strategic partnership for the decarbonisation of transport announced by the Scottish Government and SP Energy Networks in August 2019.
The Project PACE team at SP Energy Networks worked in collaboration with Transport Scotland and Local Authorities to deliver 167 new public EV chargers in 44 locations across Lanarkshire, targeting areas and communities where the commercial market has not yet delivered and is unlikely to in the short to medium term.
Project PACE explored the benefits of having a distribution network operator (DNO) involved in the various stages of deploying universally accessible public EV charger infrastructure, including costs and delivery timescales.
View a video about the project here:
Project PACE has installed electric vehicle charging hubs at 44 locations across North & South Lanarkshire.
The locations of the EV charging hubs in North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire and the number of each type of EV charger (standard 7kW, fast 22kW and rapid 50kW) are shown in the maps below:
Above: PACE EV charging hubs across North Lanarkshire
Above: PACE EV charging hubs across South Lanarkshire
Project Benefits
Project PACE has achieved key benefits at different stages of the project, from design through to delivery and beyond. Below is an overview of the project, with links to both the Optioneering Report & Closedown Report.
Project Pace Optioneering & Close Down Reports – now published
The widescale rollout of publicly available Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is essential to meet the Scottish and UK Governments’ Net Zero targets. Project PACE helps to achieve these goals by building on the success of the Transport Scotland ChargePlace Scotland network and trialling an innovative DNO-led model to deliver a strategic network of EV chargers across North and South Lanarkshire in areas where the market has not yet delivered and is not expected to deliver in the short to medium term.
Project PACE has successfully delivered 167 EV chargers across 44 EV charging hubs in North and South Lanarkshire. This had led to an increase in the number of public EV chargers for Lanarkshire communities by over 200% and increasing the number of public EV chargers in Scotland as a whole by around 14%.
The first phase of the project was a sophisticated site selection study funded by the SP Energy Networks Green Economy Fund to provide a blueprint for best practice and collaboration. SP Energy Networks utilised its extensive knowledge of its electricity network and customers and worked collaboratively with local stakeholders to identify the optimal locations for the community EV charging hubs.
By choosing charging locations that make effective use of the existing electricity network, Project PACE is expected to achieve between £30,000 and £60,000 average savings on electricity grid connection costs per new location. This equates to a total of between £1.4 million to £2.9 million of taxpayer money saved across all the installed sites. Scaling up the innovative site selection approach across other regions could lead to £26million of connection savings in Scotland and £310million of the same savings across the UK.
The Transport Scotland grant funding was made available in June 2020. Due to the site selection study having been carried out in advance, funded by the SP Energy Networks Green Economy Fund, and SP Energy Network’s significant experience in delivering complex infrastructure projects, the construction of the first EV charging hub was commenced in July 2020 and the last EV charging hub went live in August 2021. This equates to a delivery phase of 52 weeks for all 44 EV charging hubs.
The EV charging hubs have been extremely popular with EV drivers in Lanarkshire with over 91,000 charging events taking place between the first site going live in August 2020 and the site ownership being transferred to the Local Authorities in December 2021. Over 7,500 discrete users have used the chargers and the total number of charging events have supplied over 3520 MWh of energy, enough to drive over 13.7 million miles or 552 times round the Earth. If these miles were driven by petrol or diesel cars, over 2380 tonnes of CO2 would have been released requiring over 113,000 mature trees to absorb.
Find out more in our Fact Card, optioneering study and closedown report below: