Superfast Electricity for Electric Cars

We are pioneering a ‘superfast electricity’ approach to service cables, where customers with electric vehicles (EVs) or other low carbon technologies  could be offered an upgrade to help balance their demands and reduce overall losses, as Policy Engineer Peter White explains. 

“In simple terms, from a customer point of view, if you had an EV and a single phase supply you could put 20 miles of charge per hour into your EV cars’ battery. If you had a three phase supply and charger, then you could put 55 miles of charge an hour into your EV cars battery.

“We hope that this will be viewed in the same way as broadband with customers upgrading as a way of introducing additional flexibility into their lives.  We believe now is the time to mandate that all new supplies change to three phase with a 60Amp per phase capacity and we are promoting projects to demonstrate the benefits of change. 
 
“WPD is currently working with SERO Homes, Pobl, Monmouthshire County Council and the Welsh government on new build and retrofit housing projects where three phase services will be installed in homes.  Once the housing has been completed and the tenants are living in the houses, the projects will run for a further 18 to 24 months to gather the required information.

“With the learning from the projects we plan to make the change to provide three phase services as our standard installation. We will also share our results with the wider industry,” said Peter.