The Assure Charge project will undertake industrial research and development of a service platform that provides a more effective and regulated way to perform maintenance and repair of EV charging infrastructure. The project will leverage the large volumes of connected data available from EV charging infrastructure to operate and maintain this infrastructure more reliably and efficiently. It will do this by enabling collaboration among existing and new market players and providing them with the information and tools they require to achieve the levels of reliability required for widespread adoption of zero emission vehicles. The Assure Charge project will develop an MVP of the underlying platform that connects local workforces with EV charge point service and repair requirements. This will increase EV charge point network reliability and reduce mean time to repair when faults occur. Standardized service level agreements will be designed to reduce the complexity and overhead of charge point infrastructure ownership and investment. Charge point operators and investors will benefit from auto-generated reports of infrastructure uptime and reliability -- empowering them to access and enforce service level agreements. The Assure Charge project team will work closely with Electric Vehicle Associations in England and Scotland to conduct a thorough review of the experiences of EV drivers today and technical and commercial structures used for maintenance and repair. Subsequently, a range of EV infrastructure stakeholders, including drivers, will be consulted on what they see as the ideal future of infrastructure repair and maintenance. This stakeholder engagement and customer discovery process will be used to inform the vision of Assure Charge and prioritise the most valuable first steps to provide focus for a field pilot of the developed service platform. The ultimate objective of the Assure Charge project is to improve the EV user experience by removing the burden of unreliable infrastructure from their concern and into a well-regulated and efficient platform of service providers. The Assure Charge project addresses an important pain point of our industry at a critical moment. As private (e.g. domestic, workplace, commercial fleet) and public infrastructure matures, fault and service requirement volumes will increase. The requirement for services to keep critical EV charging infrastructure and services online are imperative to the UK Government net-zero targets.

The Virgin Media Park and Charge project (VPACH) will demonstrate at scale an innovative new approach to building on-street charging solutions for hard to address residential areas using the existing and widespread power and communications network assets of Virgin Media VPACH has an ambitious target of deploying and operating 1200 charge points. Key to providing the scale of this project will be a group of Local Authorities covering 11 local authority areas: they are committed to ensuring that site selection, parking and highways strategy, procurement processes, and street furniture requirements are aligned with the need of the communities to provide charging solutions which will encourage and enable the uptake of EV adoption. The scale of the project is supported by the scale of the existing infrastructure portfolio that Virgin Media has, which includes 170,000 km of ducts and 40,000 grid connections plus tens of thousands of additional cabinets. This will provide the cost-effective foundation upon which a variety of Charging Point Operators (CPOs) can install their open source, fully integrated, hardware and systems. This approach will help minimise new street furniture and benefit from access to a high-speed data communications network for charging apps and EV data offload alongside public Wi-Fi and IoT services such as pollution monitoring and parking management. This project will develop a demand led charging point request process to engage with existing and potential EV owners alongside geospatial planning and analysis to identify the most suitable locations overlaying forecast EV demand, grid constraints, infrastructure costs and Virgin Media's network coverage. The consortium is led by SMS plc in partnership with Virgin Media and is made up of key constituents of the residential charging value chain. Vattenfall Incharge and Chargepoint Services Ltd. are the charging point operators. The Local Authorities led by Phase 1 participants Oxfordshire County Council and West Midlands Combined Authority also now include Worcestershire County Council, Croydon, Southend, Northampton,Wandsworth and Liverpool councils. Technical, geo-spatial planning and grid flexibility expertise will be provided by Cenex, Loughborough University Transport Studies Institute and The UK Decentralised Energy Trading Association (DETA). Innovation in hardware and eMobility Services will be provided by Connected Kerb and GINGER. We are also delighted to welcome Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged as our communications and events partner.