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RAW Charging installs EV stations with GWR

Posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2021.

Worcestershire County Council opened Worcestershire Parkway station in Norton, UK, to increase connectivity to London, the Midlands and South Wales.

Part of Great Western Railway’s (GWR) network with services to London Paddington, Worcestershire Parkway is the first new railway in the county for more than 100 years.  The new station will operate will also see services operate between Hereford, /Great Malvern and /Worcester, and the Thames Valley and London Paddington through Pershore, Evesham, Oxford and Reading stations.

RAW Charging secured the contract following a lengthy and Working through a lengthy and rigorously-scored selection tender process.  Speaking on the decision to partner with RAW Charging, GWR’s Head of Sustainability Amie Coppin said: “We set out to find a delivery partner that would enable us to provide the best EV charging experience for our customers, allowing station users to take full advantage of the range of services on offer, and to make more sustainable choices about how they can travel.”

RAW’s Key Account Manager, Neil Broadbank comments on the project: “we are delighted to have been successful in the national bidding process to work alongside GWR and First Group in this flagship project”.

Up until now a key issue that railway car park operators come across when installing a small number of EV chargers has been the issue of ‘idle’ chargers, when commuters plug in and leave their EVs for extended periods of time, thus resulting in both a lack of opportunity for other drivers to charge, and a stranded investment for the charging station owner at the point a car is fully charged.

Broadbank adds: “With Worcestershire Parkway and the dozens of other railway station projects that RAW are working on, it has been key to consider the different use cases when implementing the design and installation of EV charging infrastructure, and not least catering for the ‘commuter’.

We approached the project two-fold: initially by installing a larger number of charging points to meet future demand, rather than installing on a reactive basis; and secondly, configuring and trialling the combination of several different pricing and access structures on the ChargePoint platform.

 

For example, we have looked at standard per kWh fees, combined with parking fees, flat rates or connection fees for extended periods of time; and different rates for customers, different groups of chargers on site, and lots of other options, all of which can be run simultaneously and changed or scheduled remotely. 

Using the same EV charging platform that is tried and tested by some of the world’s largest organisations provided GWR with the comfort that this new ‘critical infrastructure’ operated without a hitch from the start.”

“ChargePoint’s mission is to get every driver behind the wheel of an EV,” said André ten Bloemendal, Vice President of Sales, Europe, at ChargePoint Inc. “To make that happen, drivers need to be able to charge everywhere they go and whenever they need to do so. We’re delighted that GWR and First Group are not only supporting the shift to electric mobility but integrating it into the future of national sustainable travel by installing such a substantial charging hub in Worcester”