EV charge points in the United Kingdom

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Legislated access to open data

Applicable from 2023

The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 came in to force on 24th November 2023. The regulations require operators of publicly accessible electric vehicle charge points to publish open data related to the charge points. As summarised in the supporting guidance:

All data must be accurate and charge point operators must use the Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) to hold and open their data. Reference and availability data must be made publicly available and in a machine-readable format.

Not all the data will be of use to OpenStreetMap. The type of data of most use is what the regulation refers to as “Reference data”. This means information that does not change frequently about a charge point including but not limited to location, connector type, pricing, payment method and time restrictions. Availability data could be of use in OpenStreetMap – for example to identify and tag charge points that have been out of operation for a prolonged period of time.

Operators have one year to comply with this (i.e. by 24th November 2024). Data must be open in line with the Open Government Licence. Specifically “a charge point operator must ensure that reference data and availability data is made available to the public free of charge and in a machine readable format without any requirement to agree to terms and conditions regarding the use of that data”.

The data requirement that charge point operators hold must align to paragraphs 8.3.1 to 8.3.3 in version 2.2.1 of the OCPI.

Earlier legislation

The Directive on the deployment of alternative fuels infrastructure 2014/94/EU (also known as the CPT Directive) introduced new EU rules to ensure the build-up of alternative refuelling points across Europe. It set out the need to “provide vehicle users with data regarding the geographic location of the refuelling and recharging points accessible to the public” and that this data “should be accessible on an open and non-discriminatory basis to all users”.

This Directive was transposed into UK law via the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulations 2017. The guidance document clarified that, for the context of the UK legislation, open and non-discriminatory basis “means that the data is freely available to anyone who wishes to access it (both public and business users for commercial use) without restriction”. Operators were free to choose how they provide this data and it appears most did so by adding maps to their websites and/or uploading their data to the National Chargepoint Registry (NCR). The NCR is provided by Cenex and includes an API for access.

While for EV charge points, this part of the prior legislation has effectively been superseded, the earlier legislation is still of use for non-electric refuelling, such as hydrogen vehicle refuelling points.

List of available CPO datasets

This section provides links to datasets made available by charge point operators (CPOs). Those in bold have the largest number of rapid or ultra-rapid charge points according to zap-map.

Import projects

Gridserve

Status: Proposed 2025-03-03, currently at community discussion stage.

I (RobJN) would like to start importing Gridserve data in to OpenStreetMap. The import will be done manually - i.e. checking each item and adding the relevant data to any existing node/way in JOSM. Data has been sourced from the API as listed above and is therefore compatible with OpenStreetMap as it is released under the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 in a manner which is "in line with the Open Government Licence". Furthermore, as part of transforming the data to OpenStreetMap tags I have been in contact with the data team at Gridserve and as such they are aware that I will be adding this in to OSM and are in support of this.

Only the locations will be added (i.e. amenity=charging_station) and not each individual charging stall (man_made=charge_point). Data transformation is via a python script which has also been checked by Gridserve. The results in the following tags being added to a geojson file which I will use to complete a manual (site by site) import in JOSM:

OSM tag Notes
n/a I start by filtering the API for only those locations where publish=True. This removes test sites, sites being constructed, etc from the API. This was identified during my QA checking.
n/a There are lat/lon coordinates in the API. As part of QA I have cross checked a number of these against the existing OSM data and they are all accurate. This is as expected as the data is provided through to a number of apps and mapping companies so important to be accurate so customers are routed to the correct location. Nevertheless I will stay alert during the import stage and cross-check other sources, e.g. Bing imagery.
amenity=charging_station The main Feature tag for EV charging locations.
brand=Gridserve They stylise their name as GRIDSERVE but I am dropping the upper case, same as we do with e.g. Tesco.
brand:wikidata=Q89575318
operator=Gridserve
operator:wikidata=Q89575318
ref= Tag value will be taken from the location ID in the API. I will review this as I update any existing sites. It may be that I want to create a specific reference tag (e.g. if I find existing data already includes a ref tag.
source:ref= To include this text: "Location ID in the Gridserve Open Data API released to comply with The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023. https://gridserve.com/open-data/"
addr:street (EXCLUDED) I will not add this tag. The API includes an Adress tag but it does not nicely consistently map to either addr:street or addr:place, instead it is more like a location description (e.g. M40 Warwick Services Northbound).
addr:city Sourced from the City value in the API.
addr:postcode Sourced from the Postcode value in the API.
website=https://electrichighway.gridserve.com The only have dedicated webpages for a small handfull of sites (their Electric Forecourts). For all other sites I will link to this main page.
phone=+44 800 240 4242 As above, the sites don't have their own phone numbers, this is a common support number across all sites.
ref_name= I found that there is no name sign (other than their brand "GRIDSERVE") at the physical location. However they have names for their sites on their online map. I will add the name entry in the AP to this OpenStreetMap tag as that sounds most sensible. I will strip "EH - " from the start of the name in the API to bring it in line with the name on their website.
name= I will add this only for their larger sites ("Electric Forecourts") in line with how these are already mapped in OSM (e.g. name=Gridserve Braintree Electric Forecourt)
opening_hours= 24/7 if the twentyfourseven value in their API is set to True (almost all cases). Otherwise daily opening and closing times created in accordance with OSM schema (small number of cases, circa 5)
socket:*=

and socket:*:output=

A lookup table is used to map how they refer to each socket type to how we refer to them. I then count the number of sockets grouped by output (kW power rating).

The intent is to add these over a period of a few weeks once our community has had time to comment on the proposal. Currently I plan to do this on my own and relevant tags will be added to the changeset (source, import=yes, link to this page, etc).

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