Last week, we stopped at a charger on the way home from Southampton, watched the screen tick up to 89p per kWh, and felt the particular emotional whiplash that comes from combining a home win with an infrastructure reality check.
That article was about experience. About fairness. About the quiet divide between drivers who can charge at home and those who cannot.
This one is about what sits behind that moment, and what happens next.
If prices like that are not simply instances of profiteering, then what kind of system have we built, and who ultimately bears the costs of its shortcomings?
First, a necessary distinction
One reason the EV charging debate often becomes confused is that very different actors are treated as a single amorphous villain.
There are:
Energy suppliers, who sell electricity
Energy networks, which own the wires and substations
Charge point operators, who build and run chargers
Site owners, such as motorway services and retail parks
The price you see on a public charger is usually set by the charge point operator and the site owner, shaped by grid costs and taxation, not by your domestic energy supplier.
That does not make the system benign. This indicates that the problem is structural rather than personal.
This is not one charger. This is infrastructure, scale, and consequence.
Why the “water companies” comparison keeps surfacing
Readers repeatedly ask whether this is starting to resemble water. Slow upgrades, rising bills, and customers asked to absorb the cost of delay.
The comparison is uncomfortable because it is not entirely wrong.
Not because EV charging firms are quietly siphoning off dividends at the plug, but because infrastructure risk is being handled familiarly.
In both water and energy, we see:
Long-term investment deferred because it is expensive and politically awkward
Capacity stretched as demand rises faster than upgrades
Costs recovered through bills and tariffs rather than systemic reform
The result is not a scandal. It is a price shock without a clear culprit, which is often worse.
The grid is the quiet constraint.
Public EV charging struggles not because chargers are exotic pieces of kit, but because the grid behind them was not designed for dozens of cars drawing large amounts of power at once.
Grid reinforcement is:
Slow
Capital-intensive
Heavily regulated
Paid for through connection charges and, ultimately, consumer bills
Charge point operators regularly face six-figure costs just to connect a site. Those costs are then recovered one charging session at a time.
As Ewan put it, “You’re told this is the future, but the future arrives priced like a luxury add-on.”
The bottleneck is not the plug. It is everything behind it.
Is competition supposed to fix this?
In theory, yes.
In practice, only sometimes.
Public charging markets fall into three broad categories:
Competitive hubs, such as motorway services and large retail parks, where multiple operators cluster. Prices may soften here as utilisation rises.
Thin markets, such as small towns or edge-of-city sites, where one operator effectively sets the price.
Natural monopolies, particularly on-street residential charging, where space, planning rules, and grid constraints make meaningful competition unrealistic.
In the second and third categories, competition does not behave as the textbooks promise. Prices can remain high not because anyone is gouging, but because drivers have nowhere else to go.
The tax sting in the tail
Just as this uneven pricing becomes visible, the government has added a new layer.
From 2028, electric vehicles will begin paying a mileage-based road tax, intended to replace the fuel duty revenue lost as petrol and diesel decline.
In principle, this is reasonable. Roads still need funding.
In practice, it sits atop an already uneven system.
Drivers who rely on public charging already pay 20 per cent VAT on electricity, compared with 5 per cent VAT for home charging. Add a per-mile tax, and those same drivers are now contributing through:
Higher VAT at the charger
Higher per-mile road taxation
Often, higher per-mile energy costs
Petrol and diesel drivers also pay significant tax, but the comparison breaks down because the EV tax burden is already skewed by access, not usage.
Ewan summed it up neatly. “We’re taxing mileage, but we’ve already been taxing geography.”
Has the government explained how this will be managed?
Only in outline.
The current proposal avoids live tracking and relies on odometer reporting, folded into the existing vehicle tax system, with annual reconciliation.
That may satisfy privacy concerns, but it leaves bigger questions unanswered:
How overlapping taxes interact in practice
Whether VAT treatment will be reformed
How fairness is measured between home and public charging users
At present, those questions are parked somewhere between consultation and hope.
One charger, one price, no alternative. This is not a free market in any meaningful sense.
When high prices stop being defensible
This is where the clock begins to tick.
Today, high public charging prices can plausibly be explained by:
Low utilisation
High capital costs
Expensive grid connections
Full commercial VAT
But those explanations have a shelf life.
As EV adoption rises, chargers are used more frequently, infrastructure is paid down, and power costs may fall with a greater mix of renewables, thereby weakening the justification.
If prices remain high after those conditions change, the issue shifts.
At that point, it is no longer about early-market pain. It is about governance.
Keeping charging companies honest without killing the market
This does not require heavy-handed nationalisation or price caps across the board. It requires realism about where markets operate and where they do not.
A fair system would include:
Transparent, comparable pricing, so drivers can actually exercise choice
Targeted regulation in thin markets, where competition is structurally weak
Grid connection reform, so public money that de-risks infrastructure does not quietly entrench high prices
VAT reform, so the tax system stops penalising people without driveways
None of this assumes bad faith. It assumes that markets, left alone, do not naturally deliver fairness in every context.
Who is really paying for the transition?
The answer is everyone, but not equally.
Taxpayers fund grants and grid upgrades.
Drivers fund high per-unit prices.
Those without home charging fund a disproportionate share of the early transition costs.
This is tolerable if it is temporary and transparent.
It becomes corrosive if it hardens into a permanent feature of the system.
The infrastructure is here. The system is not finished.
Back to that charger
At Chieveley, the charger worked. The car charged. The journey continued.
The problem is not the plug. It is the system behind it.
If last week’s article was about the shock of 89p, this one is about what happens when that shock stops being excusable.
Because high prices can be justified for a while.
They cannot be justified forever.
