IN Brief:
- All applicants withdrew from the £70m Rapid Charging Fund pilot and no grant funding was allocated.
- The evaluation identifies planning horizons, grant risk, internal capacity, and DNO connection processes among the barriers.
- Future policy must reconcile long-term grid reinforcement with the shorter commercial investment cycles of motorway service operators.
The Department for Transport has published an evaluation of the Rapid Charging Fund pilot showing that all applicants withdrew and no grant funding was allocated, despite the programme being designed to accelerate electricity-network upgrades at motorway service areas.
The £70 million pilot was launched in December 2023 ahead of the planned £950 million Rapid Charging Fund. It tested whether capital grants could support major network reinforcement where motorway service operators needed more electrical capacity for ultra-rapid charging but could not justify the full connection cost commercially.
Frontier Economics and SYSTRA carried out the independent process evaluation for DfT, covering the pilot from inception to January 2025. The work drew on document review and ten semi-structured interviews or focus groups involving DfT, National Highways, motorway service operators, distribution network operators, and chargepoint operators.
The central finding is blunt: the pilot produced no funded projects. All applicants withdrew after commercial, regulatory, and delivery problems accumulated around the proposed upgrades, leaving government with evidence of why future-proofing charging infrastructure is more complicated than subsidising a proportion of the capital cost.
The programme was designed around long investment horizons. DfT wanted upgrades to meet demand at least to 2035, with proposals capable of future-proofing for 2050 demand, while motorway service operators generally plan investment over shorter three-to-five-year periods.
That difference moved risk towards businesses being asked to invest substantially ahead of demonstrated utilisation. The evaluation says operators regarded the scale of some upfront commitments as infeasibly large or risky in the context of uncertain EV demand and future government policy.
Grant terms created a second problem. Applicants were expected to sign agreements based on standard Cabinet Office terms, including clawback provisions and possible exposure to cost increases or delays. Operators argued that this left them carrying risks even where delivery depended on distribution network operators or other circumstances outside their control.
Internal capacity also mattered. Some motorway service operators had relatively small teams focused on site operations rather than major infrastructure delivery, while the pilot did not fund dedicated project-management resource. That made complex grid-upgrade programmes difficult to absorb alongside normal operating responsibilities.
The electricity connection process added another layer. Distribution network operators have to follow regulated procedures and manage demand from multiple sectors rather than prioritising motorway sites, while reinforcement costs and delivery dates can change as detailed studies progress and wider network investment plans evolve.
Land and planning requirements can make the physical route equally awkward. Larger supplies may require new cable corridors, substations, transformers, switchgear, protection systems, and civil works extending beyond the service-area boundary, sometimes across third-party land that requires wayleaves or easements.
Those findings put electrical capacity rather than charger hardware at the centre of the motorway problem. Ultra-rapid units can be installed comparatively quickly once sufficient power exists, but upstream reinforcement can involve equipment and construction programmes with much longer lead times.
The evaluation also records evidence that operators remain willing to invest in charging where adequate power is available. Several stakeholders questioned whether future support should therefore continue to flow principally through motorway service operators or align more closely with the network companies responsible for reinforcement.
Participants pointed to Ofgem’s earlier Green Recovery Scheme as a potentially more workable model because distribution network operators could fund and deliver reinforcement directly from reallocated network underspends. The report does not prescribe that approach, but it makes the wider issue hard to avoid: financial risk and delivery responsibility need to sit with organisations able to control the relevant work.
The load growth involved is substantial. A motorway site historically designed around lighting, retail, catering, and fuel-station loads can become a multi-megawatt electricity user as clusters of ultra-rapid chargers expand, forcing the connection to be considered as a distribution-infrastructure project rather than a collection of parking-space installations.
Private investment alone may not deliver that capacity far enough ahead of need. The evaluation finds that operators tend to expand incrementally in response to demonstrated demand, whereas the policy objective was to create larger future-proofed connections before utilisation fully materialised so that the grid would not become the limiting factor later.
The pilot still produced operational learning. National Highways developed internal capability, relationships between service operators and distribution companies improved, and demand-forecasting guidance created during the programme has continued to inform some operators’ infrastructure planning.
Future policy now has a clearer set of engineering and commercial questions to answer: who carries connection risk, how far ahead of demand reinforcement should be built, how network companies are involved, and how grant conditions accommodate projects whose delivery can stretch beyond the normal planning horizon of the business receiving the money.
The £70 million pilot allocated nothing, but that failure produced a useful diagnosis. At difficult motorway sites, rapid charging is constrained less by the ability to buy chargers than by the cost, timing, ownership, and risk allocation of the electricity infrastructure behind them.
