James O'Neill's blog

At the start of Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, someone explains that to find some information he had to go to a basement which was lacking both light and stairs, where it was “In the bottom drawer of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, ‘Beware of the leopard’”. My experience getting data covered by the UK’s Public Charge-Point Regulations leaves me feeling he had it easy.

The regulations arrived in 2023, they specifically excluded private or workplace chargers and gave Charge Point Operators (CPOs) a year to meet several criteria:

• Chargers must display pricing per kWh and above 8kW they must accept contactless payments (below 8KW can require an app). From November 2025 they must also support at least one roaming payment provider.
• Networks must achieve 99% availability, and operators must submit annual up-time reports.
• Operators needed to confirm by December 2024 that they had a free 24/365 helpline and then report calls quarterly.
• Operators must “ensure that reference data and availability data is made available to the public free of charge”; it must be stored in a standard format, OCPI 2.2

I’m interested in the data rather than other compliance issues with the others. A lot of it is static reference data - in descending order of importance to the driver: where can we go to charge, when each site is open, the power available (even if we can’t use the headline speed), payment methods and finally who operates it.
Pricing may have peak / off-peak rates and availability will change as other drivers come and go or faults occur.

I expected to go to operators’ websites, find a “how to call our API” page, write a few lines of PowerShell and have the data - how hard could it be? Well…

In early 2025 there are lots of apps to tell drivers about chargers, many linked to an operator or payment provider. Some seem to have been written without asking, “How is this useful?” before making another version of “Google maps showing some chargers” and/or “A more awkward way to pay”. Vendors want me to install their app when I just want to see a complete list of options in one place. Completeness makes or breaks some analysis: a sample lets you say “Rapid changers are busiest at this time”, but saying that A quarter of England’s strategic A-roads have electric car charging ‘cold spots’ could report data gaps as charger gaps. But whether the goal is an app or data analysis, anyone wanting data from many operators needs to aggregate it for themselves

In hindsight this might have flagged a “Beware of the leopard” experience. So might the absence of a definitive list of CPOs, but I just started making my own. One of the first open-data pages I found was Fastned’s. It walked me through getting and using an API-key and I had their data in a couple of minutes. A CPO with fewer than 50 locations making things easy seemed a good start; keys are a minor nuisance, but they’re a first line of defence against things like denial-of-service attacks.
Next came Mer whose link didn’t need a key. BP pulse had an access request from and after a while I found one for Shell. Both forms went to eco-movement, a Dutch company, who replied with keys and a short how-to guide, all quick, professional and easy to code because different keys with the same request URL returned different operators’ data.

After a third form went to them, I asked if eco-movement would tell me who else they provided this service for. No, they said, that would break client confidentiality. The following isn’t verbatim, but the gist of the exchange that followed.
    “But this data is – you know – public - there’s no need to make a secret of meeeting a legal requirement” I argued.
    “Not really, it’s available to the public if they ask for it which isn’t quite the same”
    “But you’ll give me data if make the right requests?” I said, trying another tack
    “Of course, operators pay us to do that!”
    “So, what requests can I make?” - they weren’t so easily outflanked
    “Sorry, we can’t tell you”.

I wasn’t sure if I was in that Douglas Adams scene, something more Kafkaesque or perhaps in the Yes, Prime Minister, episode where he complains “I don’t know because I can’t find what questions to ask you, and I don’t know what to ask you because I don’t know”.

One CPO’s form for eco-movement had a box to fill in for the operator-name, so I tried entering other names, I got one success, three failures and a query about what I was playing at. A few more of their customers have emerged since.

Some CPOs don’t publish Open-Data access details, so I had to contact them. Three admitted missing the deadline and lacking a data-feed. Others replied promptly, I thanked Osprey Charging, for being quick and they took an interest in my project - they have an interesting white paper on costs too. Sainsbury’s Smart Charge had limited contact options, but had me accessing data with 25 minutes of calling them - not just exceeding expectations but setting the fastest response record.

Others were slower but eventually provided access or a form to request it. Only one, Believ, are actively obstructive, their API is rate-limited to 1 single-point request per second, and point IDs aren’t made available. I had a Teams call with three of their senior people, who were firm that they felt sharing what others shared would harm their business. I found a workaround but getting points one by one is slow.

Some CPOSs even major ones, simply ignore requests, those in my bad books include Instavolt, Motor Fuel Group, and Tesla - all major players in rapid DC charging and char.gy and Total among AC point operators. Calls to Instavolt yeilded promises to resolve things which weren’t kept.
A few days before posting this their CEO took an interest via linked-in, but things haven’t changed yet..

Some operators see sharing data as boosting the market and beneficial to them, others seem to see it as beneficial to their competitors or a source of bad PR. As with apps, each operator’s data is like a jigsaw piece, only interesting when combined with the others, and the whole is compromised if their piece is missing. I tried to replicate the “cold spots” finding even without the CPOs I mentioned A CPO might wonder “which of those are ours”, but a driver thinks “Hey I use that road!”. If I say, wrongly, “There are no chargers on the road from A to B” the error matters more than whose charger is on that route. And a charge-point of Believ’s showing there is one on the road from Y to Z doesn’t hurt them.

It started to become clear that simply having a regulation didn’t mean the data would appear and I would need to talk to some government people about the process. And that will be the next post.