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Message Handling Protocol??? The BBC isn't a place for politics? You must be joking!

Thanks Eggy! I reckon it's chicken and egg(y) here: they depend on keen users flagging up new installations, and if practically no one is using it yet then practically no one will report it. ZapMap only covers the UK, so I've actually only referenced it once in the last five years. BUT if you are in the UK (and don't have a Tesla) it's the primary goto.

If you buy the right EV, there are no such problems. We go anywhere in Europe without any worries as to charging. The car knows where it's going to charge and when; it even predicts which chargers will be free when it arrives. The normal spacing of 160Km for superchargers is now being filled-in to 80Km in many places. In countless thousands of Km travelled, we've never had to wait to get charged anywhere. Forward planning gets us free energy at a hotel overnight, but we don't depend on this. I've even been toying with taking the car over to North Africa now there are a limited number of superchargers along the North African coast, but this is unlikely to happen as the last convenient car ferry from here ceased to run in the 1970s! So... it will probably be a discounted ferry trip to Greece in the spring for the car. I made an extremely long mains industrial-strength mains lead for our little charging block to pull out on an occasion when someone tells us the nearest domestic socket is too far away, but so far there's never been a need for it. But we still take it as extra insurance. You can go one heck of a distance on an overnight charge from just about any domestic socket. Indeed, for around a year this was our only way to charge the car out here in the sticks, but proved perfectly satisfactory. The only real motivation to install the wall charger was that we brought one with the car before we really knew what we were doing: it was collecting dust. The minimum selectable charge rate for the car is a bit on the high side at 5A though - a lower setting would enable us to use limited solar over the day directly, and spread the charge more evenly overnight. In regular daily use, it's normally fully charged (to 80%) by around 4 or 5am, even when it starts cheap rate charging after 1am. The mistake most people make when buying an EV is they assume they are buying just another car, rather than buying into a complete ecosystem. This echoes people who used to but computing equipment from spec sheets and reviews rather than looking at what applications were available and compatibility issues. The media is the main culprit here, though, as there is just so much garbage printed in the regular motoring columns, and the huge advertising spend of German manufacturers means they can't publish an objective view. So-called Hybrids: exactly why someone would buy into all the problems of lesser BEVs, and all the problems of ICE at one and the same time, is something I find hard to understand. It's always amusing to see someone with a plug-in hybrid trying hard to avoid buying dinosaur juice, though!

Cartoon? Google Data Center Under Construction in Central Ohio

Poor show this still isn't on Zapmap: it's probably missing a load of potential users! Can someone with a Zapmap account, and who can mark an exact position, please submit it? A tiny bit difficult from here! https://www.zap-map.com/add-a-charge-point

...just one competitor here. It's a race to the bottom of where power is cheapest, and Labour policy will ensure that we have anything but cheap power. I always hate to be pessimistic, but there are hard facts here that can't be ignored. So someone, please tell us why will this be any different to the doomed-from-the-outset battery factory? Blackstone don't seem to have a tenant; so it then becomes a speculation that they will be able to sell it on rapidly and leave someone else holding on to it when the invest in AI fad runs its course. To them, it's simply one of many fast turns of funds they must invest somewhere! There are so many things this government could be doing to encourage domestic enterprise. But - as per usual - it's all about the attention grabbing headline, and not serious consideration of the real factors behind domestic wealth generation. If the last government was poor, then this one is stunningly off-the-scale incompetent!

Connector type? Cost per KW/h? Payment methods? And most importantly... the power available? Is it on Zapmap - yet? Back in 2020 it was very disappointing to see just how backward the NE was when we drove our Tesla off the Zeebrugge ferry at North Shields. We'd driven some 1500Km from Italy and through the Alps with no problems whatsoever. As soon as we landed on Tyneside, it was like stepping back into the 20th century. The charger at Cramlington was utter c**p and had delivered a measly single kilowatt-hour when we returned to the car after an hour in the shopping centre. It turned out it couldn't process the credit card it initially accepted and had disconnected. The hotel (which I won't name) had a totally ambivalent attitude to EVs, and much else! They directed us to a couple of points up beside Northumberlandia, which clearly hadn't worked for months. The only charging that actually worked was at the roundabout on the spine road, and that had a queue for the single pathetic 50Kwh (minus a lot) connector post. It was also overpriced by a lot, and there were ICE vehicles making access to it difficult. Back on the continent again, it was plain sailing all the way to the Mediterranean, with no waiting anywhere for a charge; zero defective chargers encountered; and two hotels giving us free overnight charging.

Sales of pure EVs are up 23% year-on-year internationally. Much of what you read in the media about plunging EV sales is a distortion of the true position. The media has an agenda driven by their advertisers. It's true that consumers aren't buying German EVs, and that German sales fell sharply after a large rise due to German buyers bringing forward purchases due to their government scrapping subsidies. Except for the German made Tesla Model 'Y' German manufactured EVs aren't actually very good. The consumer eventually worked this out, but you won't hear this in the bought and paid for media reports! All German car sales are plunging worldwide, not just their underwhelming EVs! The German motor industry is facing its biggest ever crisis and lots of factory closures are imminent. All VW staff have been mandated a 10% pay cut, and they are just the lucky ones who aren't being made redundant.

How can they predict how many jobs there will be when they don't even know which company will tenant it? It's actually just a speculation on the current AI fad that some in the financial world think is a bubble that could burst at any time. There seems to be one major thing missing in this proposal: the impact on local electricity supplies. In truth, that's why they want to locate it here - because there's simply not enough available power in the South East! A planning application has been refused in the Irish Republic recently for this very reason:- Incidentally, the projected number of permanent jobs to be created for this proposal is a whopping 50, and that's probably egging it a lot in order to get the thing approved! Ours isn't even a firm proposal like the Google one, and simply a financial speculation by money-grubbing Blackrock. The majority of the actual jobs will be fairly lowly paid security, groundsmen, and cleaning jobs. You will probably be able to count the number of on-site technical jobs on your fingers with fingers to spare. Someone is being had or there's an epidemic of wishful thinking in the council!

Ah, but did you find out who the client was? Maybe it was a haute couture company? It's certainly a winning game for polling companies to come up with results that are far closer than the reality. This encourages more and more polling spend. Also - like so many other things in life - telling a customer what they want to hear is seldom bad for business.

Why do you say that? A polling company goes onto the streets and asks people. They pitch it so that it's easier to get responses than brush-offs. Actually, you can get a good statistical sample from less than a thousand people: so, two and a half thousand is a lot more than your average poll! I take it that you don't teach statistics? On partisanship: I'm not at all rooting for the Tory Party, but you are implying there are only two choices. The screenshot is from the Telegraph (I should have added that). Would you give Guardian polls more credibility?