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 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:
Future reports to look out for:
- Project Pace Commissioning Report – due Summer 2021