Only a few months have passed since BT’s awkwardly named UK digital incubation team, Etc., “powered up” their first Electric Vehicle (EV) charger under a 2-year pilot, which was one of potentially tens of thousands that could have been established by repurposing Openreach’s old broadband street cabinets. But it’s now being powered down and the whole scheme shelved.
Just to recap. The pilot scheme had been in the works since mid-2023 (here), although the process of actually getting it underway didn’t officially start until January 2024 (here) and the first EV car charger then didn’t do live until May 2024 (here). The core idea was for BT and Openreach to “convert or upgrade” up to 60,000 street cabinets (from a potential pool of 90,000). BT previously clarified to ISPreview that the focus here is on their FTTC (VDSL2) / DSLAM broadband cabinets, rather than older Primary Connection Points (PCP).
The charging solution itself – offering up to 7.8kW – worked by retrofitting the cabinets with a device that enabled renewable energy to be shared to a charge point alongside the existing broadband service, with no need to create a new power connection. EV charging could thus, it was hoped, be deployed to cabinets that are in-use for current copper broadband services, or in those due for retirement, depending on the space and power available to the unit. Such a use case would only grow as more cabinets were decommissioned as part of the wider transitional to full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP lines.
The first pilot EV charger ultimately went live on Monkmains Road in East Lothian (Scotland) and plans were already in motion for the next phase to focus on the deployment of up to 600 trial sites across the UK, starting in West Yorkshire (England). But Fast Charge broke the news yesterday (credits to Jon for the tip) that the pilot had been “killed” and, according to a notice sent to users of the supporting Evve Charge app, the single pilot cabinet in Scotland would be decommissioned on 14th February 2025.
A BT Spokesperson said:
“Our EV charging trials have focussed on how we might help address the charging needs EV drivers face across the UK. By adopting a pilot process we have been able to test and explore a great deal about the challenges that many on-street EV drivers are facing with charging and where BT Group can add most value to the UK EV ecosystem.
Other emerging needs we’ve identified include the Wi-Fi connectivity challenge surrounding EV’s – our pilots will now shift in focus to explore this further.”
Naturally, this approach was never going to work in every location, since not all cabinets are suitably positioned and there may be other obstacles too (e.g. issues of council approval, road access, physical location etc.). Suffice to say that pilots are useful ways of testing all of the possible caveats and working out whether the business model is viable. But the reality is that such pilots don’t always live up to expectations, as seems to be the case here.
At the time of writing, BT still has not – in our view – provided a proper explanation for specifically why the pilot has been scrapped and so soon after it first went live. But the above statement does appear to be suggesting that one problem could be in ensuring that the chargers and drivers were able to access a reliable data connection (necessary for payments and managing the charge etc.). Nevertheless, this wouldn’t be an obstacle for every location, thus we suspect it simply didn’t make economic sense.