Virgin Park and Charge 2 (VPACH2)

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£19,814,950

Sept. 30, 2019

Feb. 28, 2022

The Virgin Media Park and Charge project (VPACH) will demonstrate at scale an innovative new approach to building on-street charging solutions for hard to address residential areas using the existing and widespread power and communications network assets of Virgin Media

VPACH has an ambitious target of deploying and operating 1200 charge points. Key to providing the scale of this project will be a group of Local Authorities covering 11 local authority areas: they are committed to ensuring that site selection, parking and highways strategy, procurement processes, and street furniture requirements are aligned with the need of the communities to provide charging solutions which will encourage and enable the uptake of EV adoption.

The scale of the project is supported by the scale of the existing infrastructure portfolio that Virgin Media has, which includes 170,000 km of ducts and 40,000 grid connections plus tens of thousands of additional cabinets. This will provide the cost-effective foundation upon which a variety of Charging Point Operators (CPOs) can install their open source, fully integrated, hardware and systems. This approach will help minimise new street furniture and benefit from access to a high-speed data communications network for charging apps and EV data offload alongside public Wi-Fi and IoT services such as pollution monitoring and parking management.

This project will develop a demand led charging point request process to engage with existing and potential EV owners alongside geospatial planning and analysis to identify the most suitable locations overlaying forecast EV demand, grid constraints, infrastructure costs and Virgin Media's network coverage.

The consortium is led by SMS plc in partnership with Virgin Media and is made up of key constituents of the residential charging value chain. Vattenfall Incharge and Chargepoint Services Ltd. are the charging point operators. The Local Authorities led by Phase 1 participants Oxfordshire County Council and West Midlands Combined Authority also now include Worcestershire County Council, Croydon, Southend, Northampton,Wandsworth and Liverpool councils. Technical, geo-spatial planning and grid flexibility expertise will be provided by Cenex, Loughborough University Transport Studies Institute and The UK Decentralised Energy Trading Association (DETA). Innovation in hardware and eMobility Services will be provided by Connected Kerb and GINGER. We are also delighted to welcome Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged as our communications and events partner.