Charger Usage

The charging infrastructure needed for all HGVs in Scotland will comprise at least 63 en-route charger locations, of which 23 are already built or under development.

Summary

The minimum viable en-route charger network for all Scottish HGVs is based on 23 currently installed (or being developed) sites. These combine with 40 new sites defined by the WattRoutes project2 (Strathclyde University), and areas identified from previous analysis which lie within a 5km radius of existing truck facilities. This is the core network upon which the remainder of the analysis will be based.

An analysis of six primary HGV routes revealed a further two potentially high value locations. While not needed for routes to be completed, they would meaningfully reduce time and journey penalties from en-route charging, boosting convenience and redundancy. These additional sites have been added to the core network in Figure 9. This represents early insight into a future enhanced/optimised charger network for Scotland. Further analysis is required to develop the enhanced network fully.

High Utilisation Hot Spots

The dataset highlights heavy freight use on the A9 (Stirling-Inverness) and M74 (Glasgow-Carlisle). Strategically placed en-route chargers on these corridors would have the greatest impact on facilitating BEV journeys. High utilisation hot spots are marked in Figure 10, and the top 10 most utilised sites are listed in Table 3.

Limitations

Charger locations have been introduced in Orkney, Shetland, and the Isle of Lewis, but their utilisation is low. This reflects limited representation of island-based journeys in the current dataset. This will need to be addressed in future work.

Figure 10: Utilisation of en-route charging locations by the sample vehicles in the Agent-Based Model, as described in the text above
Figure 10: Utilisation of en-route charging locations by the sample vehicles in the Agent-Based Model

Table 12: Top 10 en-route charger locations, ranked by total annual visits and energy delivered (MWh) by the sample vehicles in the Agent-Based Model.

Location

Number of uses (annual)

Total charge delivered (MWh)

Annandale Water

7,431

2,039

Dalwhinnie

6,832

1,978

Dunfermline

6,529

902

Bathgate

2,338

493

Galashiels

2,371

421

Tyndrum

2,243

392

Abington

1,256

370

Spean Bridge

1,269

369

Eyemouth

1,296

289

Aberdeen

695

275