John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Today, I want to raise the issue of electric vehicles and the charging infrastructure around them. I did not realise until last week that without access to a private driveway, you cannot get an electric vehicle charging point. I raised this issue in committee yesterday. Thousands of people live in apartments and in terraced housing in respect of which parking is on-street and so it would not be possible for any of those people to have electric charging points installed. We have no solution as of now as to how to fix that. We are still very much in the tentative stages of charging infrastructure and how it is to be rolled out but we do not have a solution to this problem. We have introduced, by way of new building regulations, that new build apartments must include a number of electric vehicle charging points, which is welcome but for those living in apartments blocks today, or in a housing estate that is in a private development, charging points will only be available if management companies opt to install them but it might only be possible to install three or four of them. If we want to get to the stage where we have 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030 and yet a huge number of people are excluded from being able to access charging points, how do we expect to do that?

New technology being used in Germany, which the ESB could look into and on which I would like a debate at some stage in the future, enables the charging of an electric vehicle at a lamp post. The technology is being rolled out on a trial basis in Germany. It would be useful for the ESB to look into the possibility of it being used here. I would appreciate a debate in the near future on the infrastructure for electric vehicles and how we hope to roll out substantial charging points across the country.