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 are working in collaboration with Transport Scotland and Local Authorities to deliver around 180 new public chargers in more than 40 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 is exploring 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 will be installing electric vehicle charging hubs at many locations across North & South Lanarkshire.

Below is the current list of proposed sites for EV charging hubs. There may be changes to the locations listed below if unforeseen challenges are discovered.

Funding

• Project PACE is funded by the Scottish Government via Transport Scotland with match funding from SP Energy Networks
• Transport Scotland grant funding will be used to fund EV charging infrastructure and connections
• SP Energy Networks have provided match funding for:
  • Optioneering study
  • Electric Cars, people carriers and minibuses for community transport charities within Lanarkshire
  • Supporting and complimentary electric vehicle innovation projects including:
    • Electric Vehicle Uptake Modelling (EV Up), which will improve our understanding of customers’ ability to transition to EVs based on availability of off-street parking and customer demographics
    • Network Connectivity Early Warning System (NCEWS), our LV connectivity model, which will allow us to better understand, manage and forecast what is happening on our LV network
    • Centre for Energy Policy (CEP) collaboration with Professor Karen Turner from the University of Strathclyde, conducting research on economic benefits of strategic network investment for LCT transition rather than “just in time”

Project Benefits

Project PACE will achieve key benefits at different stages of the project. this page will be updated to include all key project benefits as they are published.

Project Pace Optioneering Report – 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 is delivering around180 EV chargers across more than 40 EV charging hubs in North and South Lanarkshire by April next year (funded by Transport Scotland grant). This is targeting 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 additional ca.10MW of EV charging capacity, an increase of 360% in Lanarkshire, is expected to accommodate the charging of around 5000 more EVs.

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 £1.3million to £2.6million of taxpayer money saved across all the planned 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.

Find out more in our Fact Card and the full optioneering study below:

• Project PACE Fact Card
• Project PACE Site Selection Study

Future reports to look out for:

• Project Pace Commissioning Report – due Summer 2021

Project Partners

• In Strategic Partnership with – Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government.
• Working closely with both South Lanarkshire Council and North Lanarkshire Council.
• Working with equipment suppliers and installers to deliver EV charging infrastructure

News & Reports

Latest News

• Project PACE is delivering electric vehicle charging hubs at more than 40 locations across Lanarkshire as well as providing electric vehicles to community transport charities in the area.

Key progress includes:

• First electric charging hub delivered through Project PACE
• Construction has started on the first EV charging hub at Strathclyde Park, this site will include 3 50kW rapid chargers and 3 22kW fast chargers and will be ready to use in August 2020.

Previous News

• New strategic EV Partnership marks important step towards clean energy for transport

Useful SPEN Links:

• SPEN Electric Vehicles page
• Green Economy Fund

Useful External Links:

• Chargeplace Scotland website
• Transport Scotland website

Project PACE Key Reports

• Coming soon

Timeline