The oil company BP is buying Chargemaster, a fast charging network designed to recharge cars.
Chargemaster has 6500 charging points, but having bought it, it will make it very easy for BP to add electric car charging points at its petrol stations.
There are several advantages, apart from spreading electric charging points faster (thereby making electric cars easier to recharge on long drives), the main one being that there is currently several competing charging networks. This means electric car owners need to be part of several groups. If BP can simplify this, that would be positive – provided they don’t corner the market and then increase profit levels.
For me the bigger sign from this, is that an oil company is recognising a future world where petrol and diesel are no longer required. It would be fantastic if the advent of electric transport turned one of the biggest oil companies in to an electric company.
In particular, if practical each petrol station could be covered by solar panels and given battery storage these could be carbon free fill-ups (minus setup). While this would be expensive to set up, it would make the fill-ups mostly profit.
In a future where all cars are electric, each petrol station will need much solar capacity and batteries. However, we are at a point where battery prices are failing, and if Insolight can mass-produce its new solar panel this will also double the amount of electricity greatly accelerating the time taken to pay back the cost of buying. If this happens it could restart the solar industry in the UK, that was crashed by the government removing subsidies too fast.