The end of this month marks the end of CAfS’ involvement in the electric vehicles project that we’ve been working on since late 2019 and we thought that it would be a good time to mark a few of the most significant parts of the brilliant progress that has been made over the past 18 months.

During our involvement with the project, over thirty installations of chargepoints have been completed, allowing locals who don’t have access to off-street parking to countenance switching from a petrol/diesel car for the first time.

Because of a successful collaboration with the city council, a great number of these are in Carlisle where they can be of use to the many residents who live in terraced housing and thus find it tricky to charge a car from their home.

The first public chargepoint on Walney Island was installed in early 2020 thanks to the unbridled enthusiasm of the folks at West Point House (and despite a few challenges going on in the wider world that you may be familiar with).

Kendal College accepted the offer of a chargepoint while at the same time launching into a process of adding EV technology to their engineering courses, leading the charge in more ways than one!

A whole host of parish councils and village hall committees saw an opportunity to add an asset for their community, ensuring that the more rural areas of Cumbria aren’t left out of the EV revolution by large companies concentrating on motorway service stations.

The county’s bicycle mayor officially opened one chargepoint in Penrith when it became the first to have integrated E-bike charging.

We’ve added a whole new wing to our sustainable living guide which contains all we’ve learned throughout the year on electric vehicles and how they integrate into a vision for a zero carbon Cumbria. In this is included all written and video content that we’ve created with the help of our superb EV volunteers who have been eager and willing from the first.

We welcomed hundreds of viewers to our EV webinars to discuss the practicalities of charging and costs with panels of all-knowing experts. It was heartening to see that, despite the fact that everyone was adapting to remote ways of interacting, so many people continued to show up to support our efforts!

And most recently, we released a report that investigates just how many chargepoints we’re going to need in Cumbria to service the needs of residents and visitors by 2030. Not wishing to spoil anything, it’s quite a few.

On top of this, we’ve had an absolute blast working with the entire partnership of endlessly impressive people who have been supporting Charge My Street in their upscaling of EV charging. We’ll most definitely be keeping an eye on their website to check on where the latest host site suggestion is and we look forward to charging up in our local communities as more of their distinctive sockets sprout up across the county.

For one last time, it’s our pleasure to remind you that if you have an idea for a potential host site for a chargepoint, you can register it at www.chargemystreet.co.uk/host