A look at UK’s map reveals an abundance of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. With Electric Vehicles becoming mainstream, the United Kingdom only has thirteen ultra-fast charging stations greater than or equal to 300kW. Major cities like London already have a growing number of fast chargers, but they are not enough to accommodate a significant influx of EVs. Electric cars are safe to travel on motorways because of the proximity of the chargers. However, in English Countryside, they are almost non-existent.
We will utilise our EVPlugs API to analyse charging stations in the United Kingdom. The API provides lists of global electric vehicle charging stations, including data on connector types, location and opening hours.
Retrieve Datasets of EV Charging Stations in the UK
You can use the horisystems_get_ev_data.py code below to retrieve data from the API. Running the file generates a JSON file for analysis.
import requests
import json
headers = {
# Already added when you pass json= but not when you pass data=
# 'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}
json_data = {
'username': 'evplug_user',
'password': 'evplug_pass',
}
postToken = requests.post('https://evplugs.co/v1/token', headers=headers, json=json_data)
bearerToken = postToken.json().get('Document')
print(bearerToken)
headers = {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'Authorization': f'Bearer {bearerToken}'
}
uk_data = requests.get('https://evplugs.co/v1/uk', headers=headers)
uk_data_dict = uk_data.json().get('Document')
with open('horisystems_ev_charging_station.json', 'w') as fp:
json.dump(uk_data_dict, fp)Data Exploration Key Takeaways
- Greater London has the most EV charging stations, followed by Wiltshire.
- London has more than 20% of EV charging stations in the United Kingdom.
- Chargemaster (now, bp pulse) is UK’s most prominent public charging network.
- Cityline 100 IDC is the top device model.
- Among all the EV charging stations, 99.1% of charging stations are in service.
- Our analysis revealed that 61% of the charging stations do not require payment, while the remaining 38.3% of the EV charging stations do require payment.
- 64.4% of charging stations do not require a subscription, while the remaining 35.6% of the EV charging stations require a subscription.
- Only 4.3% of charging stations do not provide 24 hours access, while 82.9% of the charging stations offer 24 hours service.
- 3.7kW, 7.0kW and 22.0kW are the top 3 standard power output kW.
The code is available here, and you can click here to run the Jupyter Notebook. EVPlugs API is free to use, but we plan to add endpoints of more countries and start charging end users for data consumption.
