Community charging
Community charging (or peer-to-peer or shared charging) is 'like Airbnb but for EV charging' (as one company puts it). It is somewhere between home charging and public charging. You are charging at a home... but it's someone else's home, the tariff is more like a public charging tariff, and you have to pick your car up again at the end.
The Irish Government has backed a trial of shared charging. The UK Government is aware of community charging but has not interfered to date.
Available services
Here are the market leaders:- ChargeShare
- CoCharger
- JustCharge by JustPark
- GoPlugable (Northern Ireland and Manchester)
- Mobula Ray EV
For those seeking to charge
Cost, distance, and availability are likely to be the key concerns for those seeking a chargepoint... just as they are for public charging!
Distance and availability depend on who is out there making their chargepoints available, but cost is an area where co-charging should be able to beat public charging.
For those with home chargepoints
Those with a certain persuasion will recognise the opportunity here from the outset. If you mark up electricity from your chargepoint by 10p/kWh and sell 100kWh a week (15hrs) to a regular customer, then that's an extra £10 a week for virtually nothing.
Pavement channel manufacturers often list community charging amongst the advantages of their product. It is worth bearing in mind that in terraced streets, community charging can turn a solution for one household to cross the driveway divide into a solution for several households to cross the divide. If one in four houses have pavement channels, could this enable the whole street to switch?
There is the inconvenience of a stranger parking on your drive, and some might find that too intimate. In France and Spain, carpooling services like BlaBlaCar see decent uptake, whereas that kind of sharing has never done so well in this country.
There is always the option of finding an arrangement with someone you already know. Letting anyone avoid paying public charging rates by charging on your drive is doing them a favour.