John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This morning, I met with Liam Grimes and Derek Reilly from Nevo.ieto have a discussion about our electric vehicle industry, the charging network and some of the opportunities and challenges the industry faces over the next couple of years. There are two key points that I thought valuable and we should have a discussion about them at some stage in the future.

One of them was a point I had raised previously, which is that anyone who does not have access to a private driveway cannot avail of an electrical vehicle charging point, so anyone in a terraced house on a street cannot get one. There are a number of ways around this but one of the key ones is to have dedicated charging points on streetscapes where there are 20 to 30 fast chargers operating over 30 minutes. We need to start the process now of local authorities identifying those areas within the urban setting where these fast-charging hubs can go, so people on streets who do not have connections to private driveways can go along, charge the car for 30 minutes, get a full charge and drive away. It is important that, at local authority level, we start to identify those areas now.

There is another issue that many people come across and as we move towards the mass adoption of electric vehicles, this will become more and more common. When people get a charger installed in their home, they then realise that because of the age of their house, rewiring of the house needs to take place to accommodate an electric vehicle charging point, and that rewiring can cost anywhere between €2,000 and €4,000.We should look at some sort of a subsidy, perhaps within the retrofit programme, specifically for the rewiring of a home in which someone wants to put in an electric charging point for an electric vehicle. It would remove another impediment to electric vehicles and would be very useful. They are two parts of the overall debate about electric vehicles that will be important to facilitate a mass shift from diesel and petrol to electric vehicles. A debate on that at some stage in the future would be very useful.